ABSTRACT
According to the Coasian argument, a public official actor has to define clear property rights in order to achieve efficiency via market. This chapter develops the legal dimension of a transaction. Using Hohfeld-Commons’s scheme of jural correlatives, this chapter shows that each legal position, because of its adversarial nature, can be reformulated as a positional good and that therefore positional concerns (and consequent potential costs) derive from each definition of rights. In other words, the definition of (property) rights by the public official actor is not neutral or costless, as the Coase theorem seems to suggest.
