Intellectual Property and Competition – Human Economic Universals

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The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology

AUTHOR:
Wolfgang Fikentscher

TITLE:
Intellectual Property and Competition – Human Economic Universals

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Wolfgang Fikentscher (2006) "Intellectual Property and Competition – Human Economic Universals", The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology: Vol. 4: Article 1.
http://www.bepress.com/giwp/default/vol4/iss1/art1

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ABSTRACT:
My contribution to this workshop is an approach to answering the question whether property, in particular intellectual property, and competition for the acquisition of such property, are innate building blocks of human behavior “deep in our brain” and inherited characteristics of our human nature, or whether they are cultural attitudes and abilities which we have to learn because we are not born with it. In the first case we would call them human universals, in the second cultural specificities. Also, a way has to be shown how we can know the one or the other.