I apply features of the economics of conflict and spatial competition in developing a model of the emergence of land ownership in hunter‐gatherer societies. Tenure regimes are the result of interactions between those seeking to defend claims to land and those seeking to infringe on those claims. The model highlights the dependence of land ownership on ecological parameters, such as resource density and predictability, and allows for situational ownership, in which the nature of ownership changes as realized ecological conditions change. The paper concludes with a comparative assessment of tenure across a representative sample of hunter‐gatherer peoples.

We consider why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. In our formal model, agents first learn skills and then enter the marriage market. We show that wasteful behavior may emerge due to strategic incentives in specialization choice and human capital acquisition and that both problems may be mitigated through a customary gender division of labor. This division is not Pareto improving. Both the distributional effects and welfare gains of a customary gender division of labor decrease as opportunities for market exchange increase.