The future of property rights: Digital technology in the real world

Abstract

Digital technology can open new frontiers in the formation, registration, and enforcement of property rights in land. This chapter explores the prospects-but also the limits-of digital technology in streamlining efficient land use and land markets. In particular, it asks whether the digital production and dissemination of information can enhance a more optimal use of land, such as by the three-dimensional (3D) delineation of real estate into distinct segments and specific rights thereto, including for subsurface infrastructure, or by the digital pooling of non-adjacent assets for purposes such as creating collective security interests in them. This chapter shows that while aligning the digital production of information with a corresponding system of "legal volumes" and 3D zoning regulation can innovate land markets, the growing multiplicity of property rights in multi-layered tracts faces a genuine collective action problem, having both commons and anticommons features. Digital technology should thus be matched with a legal reform on the institutional governance of multiple uses and interests in and across tracts, somewhat like in the case of condominiums.