ARTICLE IN PRESS

doi:10.1016/j.jeem.2007.09.001 2Our specific notion of property rights insecurity is similar to regulated open access in Homans and Wilen [16]. Our focus is on dynamic uncertainty over property rights, while theirs is on the insufficient delineation of rights, see also Costello and Deacon [10].tenure with the possibility of renewal. This raises questions of great practical and theoretical importance: To what extent will introducing limitations or uncertainty to a property right alter incentives for resource use? Could this offset some (even all) of the benefits of assigning rights in the first place? Are insecure rights and economically efficient resource use mutually exclusive? If not, what must the design of insecure rights look like in order to achieve economically efficient resource use or desired stewardship objectives? While insecure rights are perhaps the most common institutional paradigm globally, the exploitation incentives have not been carefully explored.2 We examine analytically the harvest and stewardship incentive