What are ‘property rights’, and why do they matter? A comment on Hodgson's article

This comment divides ‘property rights’ into ‘legal rights’ and ‘economic rights’ in order to distinguish between two very different concepts that are often confounded in the literature. Because of transaction costs, neither kind of rights is ever complete. These are useful in economic analysis as maximizing individuals constantly expand and shrink them. Unlike Hodgson’s, both notions of rights adopted here are positive, useful in analyzing behavior, and not normative as Hodgson (2015) claims them to be. As used by me, they do not devalue property rights as Hodgson claims.