Property Rights Design and Market Process
“Property Rights Design and Market Process: Implications for Market Theory, Marketing Theory, and S-D Logic” was recently published in Online First in Journal of Macromarketing by Michaela Haase and Michael Kleinaltenkamp, both of Freie Universitat.
Professor Kleinaltenkamp discusses the article below.
Who is the target audience for this article?
Scholars interested in the fields of marketing theory and market theory; preconditions and modes of resource integration; interdisciplinary research at the intersection of law, economics, marketing and other disciplines; institutional economics and institutional sociology.
What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
We were interested in how property rights based analyses can inform service-dominant logic and vice versa. In marketing theory, we have worked on resource integration and the collaboration of the customer in this regard. In service-dominant logic, there is a comparative focus on resource integration and value co-creation. Without the property rights to resources, no service can be exchanged for service. The provision of service depends on the respective property rights bundle held by an economic actor.
Were there findings that were surprising to you?
This study developed its arguments theoretically; there was therefore no basis for surprises which could result from a comparison of theoretical and evidence-based sentences.
How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
The analysis of property rights arrangements leads directly to the study of contracts and thus to a research program at the intersection of economics, law, and other disciplines. We think that this study is part of the development of a property rights-based or contractual approach to marketing. It will hopefully be the beginning of further theoretical and empirical analyses on the relevance of ownership and contractual design for the analysis and making of markets.
How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
The study draws on several strands of theory building in market and marketing theory which are a source of the resources-processes-outcomes (RPO) approach to the German theory of the firm. The RPO approach identifies three dimensions of a transaction: information, the integration of resources stemming from both parties to a transaction, and property rights. Although no resources can be integrated without having the property rights to them, and ownership as well as non-ownership of resources opens up different opportunities to economic activity, this field of analysis is still rather under-researched in marketing. The rental-access approach by Christopher Lovelock and Everett Gummesson has addressed the relevance of ownership or non-ownership, respectively, for the characterization of transactions and the understanding of market offerings. Although they did not refer to property rights theory in their analysis they highlighted the distinction between ownership and non-ownership and paved thus the way for our distinction between exchange type I and II. Austrian market process theory is another theoretical source of our paper. It emphasizes the relevance of human action and learning processes for the understanding of the market process. Service and the improvement of the actors’s abilities to provide service – learning – is related to this dynamic perspective.
How did your paper change during the review process?
The paper has gained a lot from the comments of our reviewers and the editing work by Steve Vargo.
What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?
We guess we have built our theoretical study on sound sources which need no change at the actual point of time.
