Mancur Olson's scientific contributions

... The combination of these rights that an actor holds for a property are determined by the interplay between actors, policy-makers, legislation, and governance mechanisms (Bromley 2012;Hicks and Cinner 2014). In a sense, these rights combined with how an ecosystem service benefit is obtained define the degree to which an ecosystem service is excludable and/or rival, thus determining whether the ecosystem service in question is a public or private good, or some combination of the two, such as a toll good or common pool resource (Olson 1971;Ostrom 2010). Furthermore, this framework provides a starting point for examining how ecosystem service flow and property rights interact to enable, or restrict, actors from obtaining ecosystem services directly. ...