Summary:

Otto Steiger discusses the astonishing question why New Institutional economics does not arrive at an adequate analysis of property. He demonstrates that this is due to its missing distinction between property and possession. The founders of the school, the ?naïve? property-rights theorists Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, as well as the originator of the political theory of property rights, Douglass North, do not distinguish between possession and property. The term ?possession? is unknown to them and confused with property.