712: A World Where You Own Nothing? Demystifying Property Rights Theory (14381)

A world without property rights would not only mean no legal ownership or an inability to exclude others from using or accessing assets, resources, or property, it would also mean the absence of legal framework to establish and protect ownership. A lack of legal infrastructure would increase interfirm friction, reduce resource conservation, and economic development would decline due to a lack of incentives for investment and entrepreneurship. If having property rights is so central and valuable, why is it that management scholars appear to take property rights theory (PRT) for granted? What are the conceptual and empirical costs that management scholars pay when diverse fields—e.g., strategy, entrepreneurship, international business, innovation, and especially social and environmental issues and OB/HR—pay very little attention to PRT? The goal of this PDW is to address these questions and motivating more and deeper research on the role of PRT in resource preservation.

This PDW is about property rights theory (PRT). FORMAT 0:00-0:02 — Welcome: Gideon Markman (Colorado State University) 0:02-0:09 — Speaker 1: Peter Klein (Baylor University) -- What is PRT? 0:09-0:16 — Speaker 2: Gideon Markman -- Applied illustrations of PRT in real life 0:16-0:23 — Speaker 3: Bill Hesterly (University of Utah) -- Research questions that urgently need redressing 0:23-0:30 — Speaker 4: Kun Liu (Kent State University) -- PRT in the context of adjacent theories (TCE, RBV, etc.) 0:30-0:40 — Break 0:40-1:40 — 1st Breakout sessions (roundtable discussions of manuscripts). 1:40-1:50 — Break 1:50-2:50 — 2nd Breakout sessions (roundtable discussions of manuscripts; reshuffling attendees and organizers). 2:50-3:00 — Concluding remarks. PDW attendees will be divided into small groups, and each group will be headed by one of the organizers. Participants will describe their working projects and research questions by following this five-point prompt: 1. From prior research we know that… 2. Yet a complication comes about because… 3. This complication is of concern because... 4. To address this concern, we did... 5. Therefore, our paper makes the following 2 contributions... We’ll conclude with an interactive discussion about avenues for future research and efforts to advance the theoretical development and application of PRT (~10 minutes).