Enforcing Property Rights: Shared Refrigerator Edition

In the past two weeks, my students and I have been discussing the importance of property rights. One message: creating property rights isn’t enough. You also need a way to enforce those rights; otherwise, they may be meaningless.

Which brings us to the universal problem of shared refrigerators. At Georgetown, our refrigerator has a big handwritten sign that says, in essence, “Don’t Take Other People’s Food.” I wonder how well that works?

I learned about another solution from many Facebook friends this morning (see also this post by Tyler Cowen): a sandwich bag with trompe l’oeil mold:

The bag reminds me of a sign in a gem/jewelry store in Australia. The entrance was like walking through a mine shaft with all sorts of quartz crystals sticking out of the wall. Rather than ask the customers to please not touch the crystals, the store had a sign that said: “Danger, the crystals contain poison. Do not touch.” When I asked, the proprietor confessed that the crystals were harmless, but they had to fib in order stop customers from trying to break off the crystals.