We describe and discuss Ronald Coase's approach to managerial authority, placing it in the broader context of recent economics and management research on intrafirm coordination. To do so, we make use of work by Coase that is relatively little known, namely his writings on opportunity cost...

This essay offers a brief overview of Ronald Coase's `The Nature of the Firm'. Section 2 of the paper is a brief outline of Coase's life and work. Section 3 outlines the arguments made in Coase's paper ‘The Nature of the Firm’. The final section is a discussion of the paper and its...

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

The ‘Coase theorem' has long been the idea most commonly associated with Ronald Coase's analysis in The Problem of Social Cost. Yet, Coase frequently argued late in his career that he has been misunderstood, and that the central message(s) of the article lay elsewhere. Though virtually all of...

Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded....

The present paper revisits the path by which Coase came to set down the result now generally known as the Coase theorem in his 1960 article. I draw on both the published record and archival resources in an effort to clear away some of the mist and, as it will emerge, dispel some of the...

More than fifty years ago Ronald Coase published ‘The Problem of Social Cost’. In his paper, Professor Coase presents an intriguing idea that has since become known among economists and lawyers as the ‘Coase Theorem’. Unlike most modern forms of economic analysis, however, Coase’s...

The Sherman Act's distinction between "unilateral" and "concerted" action is particularly salient where intrabrand restraints are concerned. Minimum resale price maintenance that takes the form of concerted action is unlawful per se, while price maintenance that takes place within a single firm...

Apart from followers as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Coase, and Maurice Allais, most economists abandoned Irving Fisher’s economic framework after the post-1929 Great Crisis. Without citing Fisher however, in 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller reutilised his framework to found...