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.
[...] February 28, 2010 by Donald Marron One of the themes of this blog is that economics is everywhere in daily life. Property rights, for example, are at the heart of everyday battles over overhead bins, shoveled-out parking spaces, and food in shared refrigerators. [...]
[...] Mediterranean) and quirky discussions of property rights (guacamole, overhead bins, snow shoveling, office lunches). So imagine my delight when I opened the Food section of the Washington Post to discover an issue [...]