Abstract
The evolution in animals of a first possession convention, in which individuals retain what they are the first to acquire, has often been taken as a foundation for the evolution of human ownership institutions. However, among humans, individuals actually only seldom retain an item they have acquired from the environment, instead typically transferring what they possess to other members of the community, to those in command, or to those who hold a contractual title. This paper presents a novel game-theoretic model of the evolution of ownership institutions as rules governing resource transfers. Integrating existing findings, the model contributes a new perspective on the emergence of communal transfers among hominin large game hunters around 200,000 years ago, of command ownership among sedentary humans in the millennia prior to the transition to agriculture, and of titled property ownership around 5,500 years ago. Since today’s property institutions motivate transfers through the promise of future returns, the analysis presented here suggests that these institutions may be placed under considerable pressure should resources become significantly constrained.
Highlights
One of the earliest applications of evolutionary game theory was to model how nonhuman animals signalling an intent to defend territory prevents wasteful conflict within groups [1, 2], and a ‘first possession’ convention is sometimes taken as the basis for human ownership institutions [3,4,5,6,7]
The model here differs from others in the literature in that it seeks to examine the evolution among human societies of communal, command, and titled property institutions, characterising these forms of ownership as institutions that govern the transfer of resource items
The evolutionary model here is constructed in contrast to an economic literature in which human ownership institutions are viewed as the result of when the marginal costs of asserting ownership are exceeded by the marginal benefits of reducing externalities, so that a mutual respect for the possessions of others reduces the costs of fighting required to defend those possessions [125, 126]
Summary
One of the earliest applications of evolutionary game theory was to model how nonhuman animals signalling an intent to defend territory prevents wasteful conflict within groups [1, 2], and a ‘first possession’ convention is sometimes taken as the basis for human ownership institutions [3,4,5,6,7]. Among humans, resource items are usually not retained by their first possessor but are transferred to others. These transfers are governed by different ownership rules (see Fig 1): under the ‘communal’ ownership norms that evolved among hunters of large game resources are transferred to other group members; under the ‘command’ ownership typical of hierarchical sedentary societies resources are transferred to those of higher status; and under ‘titled property’ ownership resources are transferred to the holder of a legal title to those resources. The general question addressed in this paper can be stated as: Why do different ownership institutions survive to govern different resource types?
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