Anticommons property is defined to be a class of property in analogy to the commons in classical economic literature to explain some of the failures and difficulties in the transition from communist to market economies. Multiple owners have privileges in a resource in a commons. The overuse of that resource has been described, notably by Hardin, as the tragedy of the commons. Heller defines an anticommons property as a scarce resource in which multiple owners have the right to individually exclude others from its use, and no one has an effective privilege of use. Stalemate results in the , the underuse of a property.

Heller examines a paradox in Moscow after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Storefronts remained empty even though the economy was growing and there was demand for consumer goods. In contrast, street kiosks in front of them filled with goods and customers.

He maintains that the phenomenon is due to a tragedy of the anticommons, an underuse of scarce resources due to the allocation of multiple new owners with the rights to exclude others from its use.

He compares the distribution of rights in commercial property (previously owned by the state with overlapping bureaucratic stakes) with other types of properties (e.g., individual apartments, communal apartments, and street kiosks.) In the latter cases, sometimes legal but more often brutally questionable means of resolving rights disputes results in more widespread use of resources in the absence of appropriate legal recourse.

While Heller devotes most of his attention to the underuse of commercial property in Moscow and other cities in the former Soviet Union, the notion of the anticommons has implications in the distribution of environmental and intellectual property rights.

Anticommons property may emerge in developed markets wherever new property rights are being defined. This can occur when new technologies make possible uses of, for example, intellectual property and environmental rights, unanticipated by the previously existing legal mechanism.

Once anticommons property appears, it is difficult to remedy the situation either through markets or subsequent regulation. Rather, Heller argues that care must be taken to avoid the accidental creation of anticommons property when new property rights are being defined by conveying core bundles of rights rather than multiple rights of exclusion.

The “second enclosure movement” attempts to put fences around the intellectual commons of ideas and facts in a manner analogous to the enclosure and transfer of property rights from the public to the private sphere during the first enclosure movement in England that fenced off common areas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new way of thinking about the public domain, the intellectual commons, is needed to combat the negative impact of this trend.

Limits on intellectual property rights are being eroded by specious arguments about the need to protect against piracy and to encourage innovation. Historically there was a sense that any grant of intellectual property rights, effectively a state granted monopoly, was to be strictly limited in term. In fact, the erosion of those historical limits through legislation and extensions of intellectual property protections like business method patents, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and patents on the human genome can be argued to decrease the possibilities for collaborative creation traditional in domains as varied as science, law, education, and music.

The first enclosure movement can be viewed as a “revolution of the rich against the poor”, it was justified by the incentives it offered for large-scale investment, for the control it offered over exploitation, and for the efficiency of exploitation of resources. It was said to “avoid the tragedies of overuse and underinvestment,” a conclusion that is subject to some debate.

The second enclosure movement is the similar much more recent application of intellectual property law to “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind”: things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

Advocates of the second enclosure argue that the extension of property rights is essential to create incentives to invention. Opponents point to the restrictions and bottlenecks on innovation and, in the case of the human genome, the claim that it is the “common heritage of humankind belonging to everyone.”

Dangers:

• Propertization is a vicious circle. Once something is made private it’s hard to take it back.
• To enclose the intellectual commons requires throwing away or restricting the characteristics of the Internet that made it so effective a force for innovation.
• The arguments for enclosure are analytically unsound and often based on the vested interests with financial abilities to sway lawmakers.

The notion of intellectual property has had critics through its history: Jefferson was concerned with the state creation of unbounded monopoly. He felt that intellectual property rights might be necessary, but should not be treated as natural rights and should be strictly limited in term.

The concept of public domain as applied to intellectual property is a relatively recent construct. Copyright is a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights. The public domain is “a commons that includes those aspects of copyrighted works which copyright does not protect.”

The Internet expanded rapidly because its core protocols, TCP/IP and HTML, are open.

A global network transforms the nature of creativity by introducing new ways of collaborating: examples include the free software and open-source software movement.

The free software and open-source software movements may serve as models for thinking about alternative ways of dealing with intellectual property which encourage collaborative innovation while offering creators the ability to distribute their inventions for financial gain. These movements stand squarely on intellectual property: they build on a living ecology of open code where the price for participation is a commitment to make incremental innovation part of the ecology.

Lessig defines a commons as “a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is a neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost.”

The General Public License (GPL) of the open-source software movement encourages continuing improvement by making source code for software and its modifications available for members of the community. Continuous, peer-monitored improvement is encouraged without violating individuals’ rights to distribute products for financial gain. Presumably the best solutions are adopted by the community.

Boyle proposes using the concept of “public domain” for intellectual property, a relatively recent term in legal discourse, as a rallying point for combating the erosion of the intellectual commons in much the manner that the concept of the “environment” was used to create a coalition of disparate self-interests.

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by the Ostroms and their colleagues at Indiana University provides a foundation for studying a multitude of theories, models, and predictions of public choice behaviors in different systems of governance and organization.

Frameworks define the action arena to which it would be applied; the resulting patterns of interactions and outcomes, and the means of evaluating those outcomes.

A framework is a general language about how varying rules, physical and material conditions, and attributes of a community affect the structure of action arenas, the incentives for actors, and resulting outcomes.

Action arenas include an action situation and the actors in that situation.

An action situation includes:

• Participants
• Positions
• Outcomes
• Action-outcome linkages
• Control that participants exercise
• Information
• Cost and benefits of outcomes

Actors (individual or corporate) involve:

• Resources brought to the situation
• Values assigned to states of the world
• Methods for dealing with knowledge and information
• Selection processes for courses of action

Analysts can make strong predictions in tightly constrained situations of complete information: overuse of resources in an open commons where the actors do not share access to collective choice arenas.

Results are not as clear in situations where actors are embedded in communities with norms of fairness and conservation as well as the ability to communicate with each other.

Evaluation criteria can include a range of values for categories such as the following:

• Economic efficiency
• Fiscal equity among actors
• Redistributional equity (e.g., policies to care for poorer individuals
• Accountability
• Conformance to a general morality
• Adaptability to change

The IAD framework has been applied to various domains to make predictions of resulting behaviors in field settings. Examples of successful application include:

• Police services
• Urban public services in general
• Common-pool resources: these were studied in laboratory as well as field settings. The IAD framework was used to create a theory of behavior. Communication of participants affects behavior: if no communication was permitted, the results approximated that of non-cooperative game theory. Communication led to different, more positive, results.
• The IAD framework was used to develop extensive databases coding common-pool resources and diverse property regimes.

“The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the problem of providing public goods, and Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons are three powerful metaphors that facilitated and structured research but also served as blinders since their limitations are often not recognized.

Models:

Kollock’s analysis divides dilemmas into two-person and N-person dilemmas. The key two-person dilemmas are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Assurance Game, and the Chicken Game. Each of these models is defined by the ordering of four possible outcomes: mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and either first or second person’s unilateral defection. Each of these outcomes generates an individual benefit for each person and is ordered by the benefit for the first person.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma models unsecured transactions, e.g. buying and selling over the Internet. The best outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma is unilateral defection of the first person, followed by mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and the worst outcome is the first person’s unilateral cooperation. Since defection has the highest potential benefit and cooperation the highest potential risk, the equilibrium of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is mutual defection. This equilibrium is deficient because the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

The Assurance Game is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma except it models situations where mutual cooperation is more benefical for each player than unilateral defection, e.g. a project that requires collaboration. This extra motivation to mutually cooperate creates two equilibria, one optimal, which is mutual cooperation, and one deficient, which is mutual defection. The optimal equilibrium requires trust between the two persons sufficient to assure each other that the other will cooperate. Insufficient trust leads to the deficient equilibrium.

The Chicken Game is again similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma except mutual defection is the worst outcome, worse than unilateral cooperation. This replaces the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s mutual defection equilibrium by two equilibria, unilateral defection and unilateral cooperation because of the strong motivation to not mutually defect. The Chicken Game is a model for situations that require volunteer effort to avoid the worst outcome but where duplicate effort is less desirable.

Kollock divides N-person dilemmas into two types based on cost and benefit for each individual. The first type is known as the social fence,s where an individual is presented with an immediate cost that generates a benefit shared by all. The individual wants to avoid the cost but if all do, everyone is worse off. A common metaphor of the social fence is the provisioning of public goods, which are (to a varying degree) non-excludable and nonrival. The key characteristic of a public good dilemma is the production function which defines the relationship between the level of resources contributed and the level of public good provided. Production functions are classified into decelarating, linear, accelerating, and step functions. Various production functions can produce N-person versions of any of the 2-person dilemmas.

The second type is know as social trap where the “individual is tempted by an immediate benefit that produces a cost to all. If all succumb to the temptation, the outcome is a collective disaster.” The usual metaphor of the social trap is the tragedy of the commons. A key feature of commons dilemmas is that the benefits are non-excludable (or difficult to make excludable) and subtractable. The key characteristic of commons dilemmas is the carrying capacity of the commons which depends on the replenishment rate of the subtractable joint resource.

Important (but not inevitable) features that affect N-person dilemma dynamics and contrast them to two-person dilemmas are anonymity, diffusion of defection cost, and little or no direct control on others. Some of these features are also found in two-person dilemmas, e.g. blaming defection on out-of-control circumstances is a form of anonymity in two-person games.

Solutions:

“The second part of [Kollock’s paper] is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solutions that do involve changing the rules of the game are [called] structural solutions.”

The motivation of not completely egoistic actors to cooperate is influenced by social value orientation, communication, and group identity. The social value orientation of a person seems to be acquired from the person’s social environment and is some linear combination of a cooperator who tries to maximize joint outcome, a competitor who tries to maximize own outcome relative to partner, and an individualist who tries to maximize own outcome. Kollock does not find any conclusive results in how to influence social value orientation but does find evidence that it varies between different countries.

The presence of communication positively affects cooperation rates. Communication enables a person to find out about others’ choices, to make explicit commitments, to appeal to what is the moral thing to do, and most importantly, to create or reinforce a sense of group identity. The effect of group identity is in fact so strong that it can affect cooperation rates even in the absence of communication. In-group behavior of individuals frequently includes personal restraint and treating Prisoner’s Dilemma situations as Assurance Games. However, in-group behavior implies out-group behavior with the potential to cause severe social costs due to intergroup conflicts.

“[Strategic solutions] rely on the ability of [egoistic] actors to shape to shape the outcomes and hence behavior of other actors. For this reason, many of these strategic solutions are limited to repeated two-person dilemmas.” Axelrod (see The Evolution of Cooperation) identifies three requirements for strategic solutions: ongoing relationships between actors (i.e. all expect shared dilemmas in their future), ability to identify each other, and ability to keep track of the other’s past behavior.

The most successful strategy in iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments (everyone against everyone) that meet these requirements is Tit-for-Tat which starts out with cooperation and then matches the partner’s previous behavior. This strategy transforms a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma into a repeated Assurance Game since the only long-term outcome of this strategy is either mutual cooperation or mutual defection (the two equilibria of the Assurance Game). Key aspects of successful strategies in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments are (1) to realize that it is not a zero-sum game hence does not benefit from a competitive social orientation (“don’t be envious”), (2) to not defect first, (3) to reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and (4) to be predictable so that the partner clearly understands one's strategy. One important caveat is that repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments assume perfect communication. In real life where communication is often imperfect more generous or forgiving strategies can avoid accidental cycles of recrimination.

Recent evidence suggests that the strategy of choosing partners is more important than the strategy used within a dilemma. In a modified version of iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament actors can exit current relationships and choose alternative partners. A very successful strategy in this environment is Out-for-Tat which exits a relationship as soon as the partner defects. A more forgiving version that gives a defecting partner a second chance is even more successful.

Strategies for N-person dilemmas involve grim triggers, social learning, and group reciprocity. In a “grim trigger” strategy an individual only cooperates if all other group members cooperate and defects as soon as one other group member defects. Social learning is the basis of a cognitively less taxing class of strategies that involves imitating other group members and look for thresholds in public good provisioning instead of calculating marginal rates of return or figuring out dominating strategies. Group identity increases cooperation rates because group members follow strategies that assume that all members share a strong expectation of group reciprocity (reciprocity within the group).

Structural solutions change the rules of the dilemma thereby changing or eliminating it. One approach is to reinforce prerequisites for strategic solutions by introducing long-term accountability (shadow of the future) that influences individual reputations. However, accountability and reputation are not sufficient to escape the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s equilibrium of mutual defection (in two- or N-person version) if the means to encourage cooperation are too weak (e.g. production function for public good too flat or too much effort required to reach provisioning point).

Many people seem to positively weigh others’ outcomes since cooperation increases significantly as the benefits to others from one’s cooperation increase. Cooperation levels are also higher if group members are asked to contribute to a non-divisible public good that only benefits the whole group, probably due to an increased sense of group identity (see group reciprocity).

Cooperation in N-person dilemmas increases if individual contributions have (or are perceived to have) a discernable effect, i.e. make an efficacious contribution. For public goods with step-level production function one can create a minimal subgroup that requires every member to contribute in order to reach the provisioning point or let two groups compete for contributions, turning an N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma into an N-person Chicken Game. Another example are "matching grants" or "adopting" an individual from a large group of benefactors.

Increasing group size makes defection more anonymous and increases the cost of organizing. However, research results on cooperation depending on group size alone are inconclusive. In the case of highly non-rival goods with a threshold production function a larger group is more likely to contain a "critical mass" of cooperating individuals. Diversity of group members' interests and resources encourages formation of critical mass.

A common structural strategy for N-person dilemmas is the creation of boundaries in an attempt to make public goods or commons more excludable. There are three main approaches: The first one is to institute an external authority or trusted leader to govern access to commons. This approach appears to be less preferable if other structural changes are possible. Establishing an external authority can raise severe problems of justice, enforcement, corruption, and scalability. The second approach is to break up commons into private parcels assuming that individuals will take better care of own property than common property. However, privatization does not work for non-divisible goods, raises the social question of who gets to own commons, does not prevent owners to routinely destroy their own property (“tragedy of enclosure”), and requires institutional support to enforce private property rights. A third approach is to locally regulate “access to and use of common property by those who actually use and have local knowledge of the resource.” One key characteristic of successful and long-lasting local regulations is clearly defined boundaries.

Sanctions are a structural method to encourage cooperation where the outcomes themselves of N-person dilemmas are too weak of a motivator. However, the implementation of sanctions can be very expensive. Local monitoring and sanctioning systems are more practical and less costly. Another way to reduce cost is to use a graduated system of sanctions with low-cost conflict resolution. A sanctioning system is itself a public good and therefore poses a second-order dilemma. Communities with a high level of trust readily cooperate in a first-order dilemma but cooperate less in a second-order dilemma hence are less willing to support a sanctioning system. The opposite is true for communities with a high level of distrust.

The central fault with Hardin’s conclusion is that it presents a disempowering, pessimistic vision of the human prospect. Users are pictured as trapped in a situation they cannot change, and thus it is argued that solutions must be imposed on users by external authorities. In fact, for thousands of years people have self-organized to manage common-pool resources, and users often do devise long-term, sustainable institutions for governing these resources.

For most of history, the use of CPRs has been at the local level. Irrigation, grazing land, etc. have been successfully managed as CPRs. However, as the pace of population growth continues and globalization increases there is a corresponding strain on resources beyond local areas. Ocean fisheries, groundwater basins and the atmosphere are some of the more obvious examples of resources that transcend local boundaries.

Designing an effective management system requires that each CPR be examined individually to determine such properties as the size and carrying capacity of the resource system, the measurability of the resource, the temporal and spatial availability of resource flows, the amount of storage in the system, whether resources move (like water, wildlife, and most fish) or are stationary (like trees and medicinal plants), how fast resources regenerate, and how various harvesting technologies affect patterns of regeneration.

Additionally, an effective management system must deal with the relationship between the resource and the users. It is critical that the system results in sufficient benefits to the users to justify the cost of maintaining the resource and monitoring its use to ensure compliance with accepted norms.

Traditional methods of CPR management combined with new insights resulting from research in social science and advances in technology will be key to designing management systems able to meet the challenge.

Research in social science offers new understanding in determining what social values need to be in place in order for diverse groups to reach agreement on how to profitably and safely use the resource. New technology offers better ways to measure the properties of a resource and enhanced ways to monitor the maintenance and use of the resource.

The rules and norms that make any CPR management system operate well are often not visible to external observers, so efforts by well-meaning outsiders (whether in the form of central government or private companies) often result in reduced rather than improved performance. Thus, it is most important that the actual users of the resource play a key role in developing the management system.

Recent years have seen a series of questions asking the applicability and usefulness of traditional collective action theory to certain contemporary phenomena. To name an example, Olson's (1965) proposition that small groups are more successful than larger ones in his account of collective action theory can now be widely contested with evidence from contemporary networks such as the highly successful Indymedia (a large network of journalists, writers, and everyday people organised around participatory media principles).

The paper first examines traditional collective action theory in relation to two central elements: the problem of free-riding and the importance of formal organisation as one important way to overcome it. The challenges presented by new uses of information and communication technologies address specifically to these fundamental elements.

A number of examples are presented, to drive the point that collective action theory has evolved or departed from its traditional concept especially with respect to free-riding (do I contribute or free-ride) and the role of, and dependence on organisation. Some examples are:

1. “Battle in Seattle”, in which a far-flung network of groups «used e-mail, the Web, and chat rooms to engage in a largely self-organising protest against the policies of the World Trade Organisation» (pp 370).
2. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBLM): «a core strength of the campaign, which still seems to be ill understood by many, has always been its loose structure» (pp. 370).
3. «participating in various groups and public forums in which people's useful contributions emerge from an interactive process rather than the explicit pursuit of a goal» (pp 371).
4. «posting information on a web page or weblog, contributing to discussion on an electronic bulletin board» (pp 372).
5. Open source projects (pp 375).
6. Spontaneously organised smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002) aimed at public goods (pp 376).

These examples effectively illustrate how the nature of free-riding, organisations, and organising have changed in the contemporary media environment. In the case of the problem of free-riding, the binary decision of whether one contributes or free-ride is no longer apparent. Instead, the individual frequently go back and forth through a process of interaction and negotiation for collective action. In many of these scenarios, decisions to free-ride or contribute can also no longer be easily discerned.

The rise of new technological and participatory media have also made communication methods that used to be exclusive to formal organisations, now available for individuals. Changing structures of organisation that are made possible by communication technologies have also resulted in the ability of social movements and groups to take on certain functions of formal organisations — even surpassing the possibilities of formal organisations. Again, the boundaries are blurred, «between traditional hierarchical forms and flexible network structures».

By studying these phenomena, collective action theory is now reframed using the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public. In this context, when an individual cross a boundary between private and public realms, and when this boundary is crossed by two or more people in conjunction with a public good, collective action is said to have occurred. This is a rich frame by which several scenarios in the current contemporary media environment can be accommodated:

• the ease of transforming private discourse to public discourse, without any specific dependence on central organisation (e.g. private responses to an e-mail discussion which eventually becomes public)
• The absence of a central organisation prompting people to share their email lists (transforming private domains into a public domain of collective action)
• The Web as a vehicle for crossing boundaries (information that are privately created may one day become useful publicly)

The facilitation of private-public boundaries results in exchanges that could arguably advance collective action. Technologies that help to identify, for example, private interests, experiences, and acquaintance once identified as shared between people can prompt collective action. Other than permitting the constitution of pubic spheres around commons interests, this focus would also accommodate the continuum by which individuals and groups can easily move back and forth between private and public realms.

Further thoughts:

The notion of using the private-public boundary crossing as the principle to explain contemporary types of collective action is a very interesting one, especially in relation to the commons paradigm in the media environment. Such reconceptualization of collective action is also necessary, in light of the various types of convergence that the world is witnessing today. The convergence of technologies and growing interdependence between people and their uses of technologies, converging communities and organisations, and convergence in media as they continuously evolve over time.

Having said this, there is also a number of theories and constructs which I think would be very useful to study along with the work raised by this paper. For example, borrowing the lens of structuration theory (Giddens, 1986) to look at how the nature of technologies in use reflect the structural and agency properties of the private and public realms would enhance understandings around the social processes of these technologies (how technologies influence and are influenced by people). The theoretical constructs of the commons, such as the Prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy as conceived by Hardin (1968) would also be relevant to study with respect to the free-riding problem and the role of organisations raised by traditional collective action theory. And along with this paper, it may also be worthwhile to reframe the commons concept in light of the contemporary scenarios of the commons.

References

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J. and Stohl, C. (2005) Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory, 15 (4), 365-388.

Giddens, A. (1986) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 62, 1243-1248

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart mobs: the next social revolution, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge.

"This chapter examines the problem of financing public goods in three settings. Two efforts combine a degree of state coercion in mandating funding, with a decentralized and competitive private sector model for allocating funds. The first is the problem of compensating artists in a world where the most efficient distribution systems are peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The second concerns the problems of funding the development of new drugs and other medical inventions. Finally, a proposal for new intermediators to facilitate voluntary collective action to finance public goods is considered."

Making DNA sequences centrally and freely available resulted in valuable innovations, such as the software tool BLAST that performs 500 trillion sequence comparisons annually.

"In a series of workshops at New York and Banff, Canada, a group of artists, lawyers, and economists looked at practical issues of how a compulsory license might work, and like most such inquires, discussed how one might set or collect fees, with alternatives such as levies on purchases of computer equipment or bandwidth, or various systems for subscription services, based either upon a flat rate or the amount of downloaded music. Some thought the fees should be paid directly from general tax revenue. There was no group consensus about these issues, but there was an appreciation that it would be good to structure the fee so that it was in some sense free on the margin (similar to how one now pays for cable television or subscriber-based radio services), and that it would be a positive feature if listeners could freely experiment with unknown artists or music types, thus contributing to discovery, growth, and opportunities for new artists."

How to allocate funds was not settled. Would some money be available to finance public goods that are not supported by the marketplace, such as experimental music or recording/archiving folk music? Should artists and studio musicians have a say? The workshops proposed that for part of artist compensation, intermediators would compete against each other and listeners could decide where to put their money. It was suggested that several experiments should be conducted and evaluated: "The Blur/Banff discussions were seeking to find a way that the listeners and artists could build a new social contract that would compete with and possibly replace t he current system of distributing and marketing music. It would seek to liberate the art from the consequences of marketing the art as a commodity. If the P2P model was successful, the expenditures on marketing would fall, and the greater share of resources would be available to artists themselves."

Health care R&D, especially research into new drugs, poses another problem. Although government grants to scientific research through academic institutions supports fundamental research, drug development is carried out by pharmaceutical companies, whose patents enable them to repay the considerable development costs — but the prices bear no relation to the cost of manufacture. The social dilemma balances the self-interest of the pharmaceutical companies who seek rents to justify lengthy and expensive development, and the needs of nations faced by epidemics such as AIDS whose citizens cannot afford access to commercially available drugs. WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires all but least-developed economies to issue patens on medicines. "This suggests a potential modification to the TRIPS agreement to allow countries an alternative way to contribute to global health-care R&D by ensuring that a fixed fraction of their GDP is being spent on supporting health care R&D," releasing such countries from their obligation to allow patents that block generic drug manufacture. Systems for efficiently collecting funds, and how to use them to fund innovation without marketing monopolies are outstanding problems to be solved.

Authors suggest competitive intermediators to "control the allocation of resources to companies and academics carrying out R&D, but not carry it out temselves (as this would be a conflict of interest). Instead each intermediator would concentrate on embracing the business model for resource allocation that it believed was the most efficient for drug development.." Prizes for R&D outputs, small grants, peer-reviewed open research projects are suggested. "Intermediates could also adopt "open" research agendas, since the ability to raise money would not be linked directly to product sales. If employers or individuals believed open research was more productive than proprietary R&D, more money would flow to open R&D projects." Consumers could possibly enjoy savings from reduction in marketing spending, which is a far larger component than R&D in pharmaceutical sales.

Another model, developed in a 2002 Rockefeller dialogue on collective management of intellectual property goods, focuses on lowering transaction costs for voluntary financing for a wide range of public goods by creating a kind of eBay marketplace, matching seekers with philanthropies, individuals, and corporate entitites. "The Matching Funds proposal is to create a new institutional framework that would make it easier to match willing funders and willing suppliers of public goods. The institutional framework would be an intermediator called Matching Funds (MF). The role of MF would be to provide due diligence on proposals for new public goods, and if the review was positive, to list the projects for subscribers." The public could critique the proposal and suggest modifications. "Subscriptions would be binding commitments to fund the project if sufficient support for the project was forthcoming from the community of persons who wanted the project done."