7 - Co-Ownership Partition

Summary

Chapter 7 summarizes the various partition approaches used around the world, finding that partition in kind is often preferred, with selling co-owned things through public or internal auctions a common back-up plan. Perhaps as a result, the existing literature has focused on partition in kind and partition by sale, while ignoring intermediate partition approaches like partial partition that are prevalent in practice. Little attention has been paid to the use of revelation mechanisms such as self-assessment, nor to how judicial partition rules affect co-owners’ pre-judicial-partition behaviors. Chapter 7 brings partial partition into the theoretical framework and proposes a new and feasible partition method that utilizes private information among co-owners and makes partition more efficient.