ECO 324 Reading
Ch3 Modeling Market Failure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
Ronald Coase
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ronald Harry Coase (born December 29, 1910; age 102) is a British
economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the
University of Chicago Law School. He graduated from the London School
of Economics in 1931. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.
Born in Willesden, England, Coase is best known for two articles in
particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of
transaction costs to explain the size of firms, and "The Problem of Social
Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could
overcome the problems of externalities.
Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern
organizational theory, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.
Coase is also often referred to as the "father" of reform in the policy for
allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, based on his article "The Federal
Communications Commission" (1959) where he criticizes spectrum
licensing, suggesting property rights as a more efficient method of allocating
spectrum to users.
Another important contribution of Coase is the "Coase Conjecture": an
informal argument that durable-goods monopolists do not have market
power because they are unable to commit to not lowering their prices in
future periods.
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