David Bollier:

Thinking about households as commons is interesting because it helps showcase the zone in which market needs and social needs intersect, coexist and get resolved. A household has many bills to pay – yet it also wishes to govern itself as a happy, civil mini-community. Economic value is not the sole purpose of a household, yet clearly it is influential and must be dealt with responsibly. It’s a pleasure to see the household’s role as a commons explored with such rigor and clarity by a scholar who knows the great value of property rights and economics, but also their limits.

The above is from a review by David Bolllier of:

* Book: Robert Ellickson. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth. Princeton University Press, 2008

* Essay: Robert Ellickson: Unpacking the Household: Informal Property Rights Around the Hearth. Yale Law Journal, November 2006, Volume 116, Issue Number 2

An excerpt from his review:

“Theoretically, a household of different members could operate according to majority rule, consensus or a rule of unanimity. But consensus seems to be the default rule in most households, Ellickson notes. Why? Because consensus offers a way for the intensity of people’s feelings to be learned and for accommodations to be made that can save relationships.

He writes: “Intimates have many reasons for preferring to create their homeways by means of spontaneous gift exchanges as opposed to express contracts.” Reciprocated acts of cooperation tend to generate pleasure, and the outcomes are generally regarded as fairer than negotiated exchanges (even in instances when the measurable result is identical). Also, gift exchange tends to have lower transaction costs than a contract. There is less haggling, less need to interpret the agreement and none of the monitoring and enforcement costs that come with a contract.

Householders who cooperate are likely to generate a “shareable surplus” – of meals cooked, of a clean house, or money more efficiently spent.

There is another advantage to operating a household as a gift economy rather than as a market. Paying people can erode the intrinsic desire to perform the task well and to please one’s housemates. And the gift exchange (“I’ll clean the bathroom if you vacuum the living room”) helps reinforce feelings of trust and mutual commitment. This helps explain why there is a preference in households to use in-kind gifts rather than money to compensate each other.

Contracts seem to be used among householders when they distrust each other or they haven’t faced a specific challenge before. But even in those instances, the householders are likely to enter into an oral contract, not a written one: a signal that social conviviality is as important as legal righteousness.

Ellickson also identifies different sources of household rules. He calls the internalized norms and personal ethics that cohabiters bring to the house “first-party rules.” These are complemented by second-party rules, which are the ones that participants generate themselves, many of which tend to be relationship-specific, and by third-party rules, which are produced by outsiders, and include laws made by governments and prevailing social norms and customs.

Taken together, the homeways that a given household creates constitute a kind of commons, which Ellickson explicitly links to the medieval commons: “The particularized ‘customs of the household’ that emerge from its history of cooperative practices are somewhat analogous to the varying ‘customs of the manor’ that evolved in medieval English villages,” he writes. ”