When too many parties hold veto rights over a resource, it is underused rather than depleted.
Heller's 1998 term. Post-Soviet Moscow storefronts sat empty because too many agencies held veto rights, and patent thickets in biotechnology produce the same underuse.
In practice
- A row of shops stands empty for years because four different bodies each hold a consent, and not one of them is refusing.
- A project needing sign-off from six departments is not delivered slowly; it is not delivered, and every department can say it approved.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Economics & Incentives
- Essay
- Rules for choosing, and the paradoxes that humbled the theory