Tragedy of the anticommons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The tragedy of the anticommons is a situation where rational individuals (acting separately) collectively waste a given resource by under-utilizing it. This happens when so many individuals have rights of exclusion (such as property rights) of a resource that the transaction costs of coordinating those rights overwhelm any previously existing benefit. This situation (the "anticommons") is contrasted with a commons, where many individuals have privileges of use (or the right not to be excluded) in a certain resource. The tragedy of the commons is that rational individuals, acting separately, may collectively over-utilize a scarce resource.
The term "tragedy of the anticommons" was originally coined in a 1998 Harvard Law Review article by Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School. In a 1998 article in Science, Heller, along with Rebecca Eisenberg, pointed to biomedical research as one of the key areas where competing patent rights could actually prevent useful and affordable products from reaching the marketplace. Too many property rights can lead to too little innovation. The countereffect of the tragedy of the anticommons, the increased usefulness of a resource as the result of many individuals using it, has been dubbed the "comedy of the commons" by Carol M. Rose in a 1987 article that appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review. It is related to the concepts of network effects and non-rivalrous goods.
