The economic analysis of property has made progress in areas of property closest to contracts and torts, where the assumption that legal rules can be studied in isolation has some plausibility. Property law is a system, and economic analysis can be used to capture the role of traditional notions...

This handbook chapter argues that part of the controversy over intellectual property stems from inadequacies in the economic theory of property rights. Property is assumed in both law and economics and in New Institutional Economics to be any expectation of being able to act upon or derive value...