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2009年1月31日星期六
人物外：科斯 wiki 2009-1-31
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase
Ronald Coase
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Coase)
Ronald Harry Coase
Chicago School
Birth December 29, 1910 (1910-12-29) (age 98)
Nationality British
Field Law and economics
Influenced Oliver E. Williamson
Contributions Coase Theorem
Analysis of transaction costs
Ronald Harry Coase (born December 29, 1910) is a British economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927-29, Coase entered the London School of Economics where he took courses with Arnold Plant.[1]
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 nature and limits of firms, and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). 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. Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational theory, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.
Contents[hide]
1 Biography
2 The Nature of the Firm
3 The Problem of Social Cost
4 Coase Conjecture
5 The Ronald Coase Institute
6 Quotes
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
//
Biography
Ronald Harry Coase was born in Willesden, England, a suburb of London. His father was a telegraphist for the post office, as was his mother before marriage. As a child, Coase had a weakness in his legs, for which he was required to wear leg-irons. Due to this problem, he attended the school for physical defects. At the age of 12, he was able to enter the Kilburn Grammar School on scholarship. At Kilburn, Coase completed the first year of his B.Comm degree and then passed on to the University of London[2].
Coase graduated from the London School of Economics with a B.Com. (Econ) in 1932, and earned a higher doctorate from the University of London in 1951. He emigrated to the United States that same year and started work at the University of Buffalo. In 1958 he moved to the University of Virginia. Coase settled at the University of Chicago in 1964 and became the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.
The Nature of the Firm
Main article: The Nature of the Firm
The Nature of the Firm was a brief but highly influential essay in which Coase tries to explain why the economy is populated by a number of business firms, instead of consisting exclusively of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another. Given that "production could be carried on without any organization [that is, firms] at all", Coase asks, why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?
Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task.
The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is "efficient" (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices a "decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function", including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are "internal" to the firm and how many "external") is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.
Other things being equal, therefore, a firm will tend to be larger:
the less the costs of organizing and the slower these costs rise with an increase in the transactions organized.
the less likely the entrepreneur is to make mistakes and the smaller the increase in mistakes with an increase in the transactions organized.
the greater the lowering (or the less the rise) in the supply price of factors of production to firms of larger size.
The first two costs will increase with the spatial distribution of the transactions organized and the dissimilarity of the transactions. This explains why firms tend to either be in different geographic locations or to perform different functions. Additionally, technology changes that mitigate the cost of organizing transactions across space will cause firms to be larger--the advent of the telephone and cheap air travel, for example, would be expected to increase the size of firms.
Coase does not consider non-contractual relationships, as between friends or family.
The Problem of Social Cost
Main article: The Problem of Social Cost
Published in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1960, while Coase was a member of the Economics department at the University of Virginia, "The Problem of Social Cost" provided the key insight that it is unclear where the blame for externalities lies. The example he gave was of a rancher whose cattle stray onto the cropland of his neighbour. If the rancher is made to restrict his cattle, he is harmed just as the farmer is if the cattle remain unrestrained.
Coase argued that without transaction costs it is economically irrelevant who is assigned initial property rights; the rancher and farmer will work out an agreement about whether to restrict the cattle or not based on the economic efficiency of doing so. Property rights allocation will hence matter only in determining distribution.
With sufficient transaction costs however, initial property rights will have a non-trivial effect. From the point of view of economic efficiency, property rights should be assigned such that the owner of the rights wants to take the economically efficient action. To elaborate, if it is efficient not to restrict the cattle, the rancher should be given the rights (so that cattle can move about freely), whereas if it is inefficient to do so, the farmer should be given the rights over the movement of the cattle (so the cattle are restricted).
This seminal argument forms the basis of the famous Coase Theorem as labeled by George Stigler.
Coase Conjecture
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.
The Ronald Coase Institute
Coase is research advisor to the Ronald Coase Institute, an organization that seeks to build the study of markets, with particular support for researchers from underdeveloped countries.
Quotes
Coase coined the well known, but often misquoted adage "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."[3]
See also
Theory of the firm
Coase theorem
Merger
Horizontal integration
Vertical integration
Partnership
Oliver E. Williamson
List of economists
University of Virginia
List of think tanks
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
The Lighthouse in Economics
References
^ Ronald Coase. "Nobel Prize Autobiography," 1991 [1]
^ Breit, William and Barry T. Hirsch. Lives of the Laureates, 4th ed. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2004.
^ Gordon Tullock, "A Comment on Daniel Klein's 'A Plea to Economists Who Favor Liberty'", Eastern Economic Journal, Spring 2001, note 2 (Text: "As Ronald Coase says, 'if you torture the data long enough it will confess'." Note: "I have heard him say this several times. So far as I know he has never published it.")
Further reading
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm". 1937 on-line version.
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm" in Economica, Vol. 4, No. 16, November 1937 pp. 386-405
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm" in Readings in Price Theory, Stigler and Boulding, editors. Chicago, R. D. Irwin, 1952.
Coase, Ronald. "The Problem of Social Cost" in Journal of Law and Economics, v. 3, n°1 pp. 1-44, 1960 on-line version.
Coase, Ronald. "Durability and Monopoly" in Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 15(1), pp. 143-49, 1972.
Coase, Ronald. "The Institutional Structure of Production", The American Economic Review, vol.82, n°4, pp. 713-719, 1992. (Nobel Prize lecture) on-line version
External links
A video of Prof. Coase talking about law and economics
Biography at the Nobel site
Biography at EconLib
Wireless Communications and Computing at a Crossroads, Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 239, 205 (describing some of Ronald Coase's theories as they apply to wireless communications and providing several footnotes for further research).
Coase Institute
"Looking for Results", interview in Reason by Thomas W. Hazlett
IDEAS/RePEc
2003 Coase Centennial Speech delivered by Coase (500MB QuickTime file, recommend downloading video before watching)
Ronald Coase
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Coase)
Ronald Harry Coase
Chicago School
Birth December 29, 1910 (1910-12-29) (age 98)
Nationality British
Field Law and economics
Influenced Oliver E. Williamson
Contributions Coase Theorem
Analysis of transaction costs
Ronald Harry Coase (born December 29, 1910) is a British economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927-29, Coase entered the London School of Economics where he took courses with Arnold Plant.[1]
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 nature and limits of firms, and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). 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. Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational theory, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.
Contents[hide]
1 Biography
2 The Nature of the Firm
3 The Problem of Social Cost
4 Coase Conjecture
5 The Ronald Coase Institute
6 Quotes
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
//
Biography
Ronald Harry Coase was born in Willesden, England, a suburb of London. His father was a telegraphist for the post office, as was his mother before marriage. As a child, Coase had a weakness in his legs, for which he was required to wear leg-irons. Due to this problem, he attended the school for physical defects. At the age of 12, he was able to enter the Kilburn Grammar School on scholarship. At Kilburn, Coase completed the first year of his B.Comm degree and then passed on to the University of London[2].
Coase graduated from the London School of Economics with a B.Com. (Econ) in 1932, and earned a higher doctorate from the University of London in 1951. He emigrated to the United States that same year and started work at the University of Buffalo. In 1958 he moved to the University of Virginia. Coase settled at the University of Chicago in 1964 and became the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.
The Nature of the Firm
Main article: The Nature of the Firm
The Nature of the Firm was a brief but highly influential essay in which Coase tries to explain why the economy is populated by a number of business firms, instead of consisting exclusively of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another. Given that "production could be carried on without any organization [that is, firms] at all", Coase asks, why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?
Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task.
The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is "efficient" (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices a "decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function", including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are "internal" to the firm and how many "external") is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.
Other things being equal, therefore, a firm will tend to be larger:
the less the costs of organizing and the slower these costs rise with an increase in the transactions organized.
the less likely the entrepreneur is to make mistakes and the smaller the increase in mistakes with an increase in the transactions organized.
the greater the lowering (or the less the rise) in the supply price of factors of production to firms of larger size.
The first two costs will increase with the spatial distribution of the transactions organized and the dissimilarity of the transactions. This explains why firms tend to either be in different geographic locations or to perform different functions. Additionally, technology changes that mitigate the cost of organizing transactions across space will cause firms to be larger--the advent of the telephone and cheap air travel, for example, would be expected to increase the size of firms.
Coase does not consider non-contractual relationships, as between friends or family.
The Problem of Social Cost
Main article: The Problem of Social Cost
Published in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1960, while Coase was a member of the Economics department at the University of Virginia, "The Problem of Social Cost" provided the key insight that it is unclear where the blame for externalities lies. The example he gave was of a rancher whose cattle stray onto the cropland of his neighbour. If the rancher is made to restrict his cattle, he is harmed just as the farmer is if the cattle remain unrestrained.
Coase argued that without transaction costs it is economically irrelevant who is assigned initial property rights; the rancher and farmer will work out an agreement about whether to restrict the cattle or not based on the economic efficiency of doing so. Property rights allocation will hence matter only in determining distribution.
With sufficient transaction costs however, initial property rights will have a non-trivial effect. From the point of view of economic efficiency, property rights should be assigned such that the owner of the rights wants to take the economically efficient action. To elaborate, if it is efficient not to restrict the cattle, the rancher should be given the rights (so that cattle can move about freely), whereas if it is inefficient to do so, the farmer should be given the rights over the movement of the cattle (so the cattle are restricted).
This seminal argument forms the basis of the famous Coase Theorem as labeled by George Stigler.
Coase Conjecture
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.
The Ronald Coase Institute
Coase is research advisor to the Ronald Coase Institute, an organization that seeks to build the study of markets, with particular support for researchers from underdeveloped countries.
Quotes
Coase coined the well known, but often misquoted adage "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."[3]
See also
Theory of the firm
Coase theorem
Merger
Horizontal integration
Vertical integration
Partnership
Oliver E. Williamson
List of economists
University of Virginia
List of think tanks
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
The Lighthouse in Economics
References
^ Ronald Coase. "Nobel Prize Autobiography," 1991 [1]
^ Breit, William and Barry T. Hirsch. Lives of the Laureates, 4th ed. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2004.
^ Gordon Tullock, "A Comment on Daniel Klein's 'A Plea to Economists Who Favor Liberty'", Eastern Economic Journal, Spring 2001, note 2 (Text: "As Ronald Coase says, 'if you torture the data long enough it will confess'." Note: "I have heard him say this several times. So far as I know he has never published it.")
Further reading
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm". 1937 on-line version.
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm" in Economica, Vol. 4, No. 16, November 1937 pp. 386-405
Coase, Ronald. "The Nature of the Firm" in Readings in Price Theory, Stigler and Boulding, editors. Chicago, R. D. Irwin, 1952.
Coase, Ronald. "The Problem of Social Cost" in Journal of Law and Economics, v. 3, n°1 pp. 1-44, 1960 on-line version.
Coase, Ronald. "Durability and Monopoly" in Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 15(1), pp. 143-49, 1972.
Coase, Ronald. "The Institutional Structure of Production", The American Economic Review, vol.82, n°4, pp. 713-719, 1992. (Nobel Prize lecture) on-line version
External links
A video of Prof. Coase talking about law and economics
Biography at the Nobel site
Biography at EconLib
Wireless Communications and Computing at a Crossroads, Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 239, 205 (describing some of Ronald Coase's theories as they apply to wireless communications and providing several footnotes for further research).
Coase Institute
"Looking for Results", interview in Reason by Thomas W. Hazlett
IDEAS/RePEc
2003 Coase Centennial Speech delivered by Coase (500MB QuickTime file, recommend downloading video before watching)
博客：芝加哥大学法学院 员工博客及学院网站
芝加哥大学法学院 员工博客
The university of Chicago
The law school
the faculty blog
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/
芝加哥大学法学院 学院网站
Law School website
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/
The university of Chicago
The law school
the faculty blog
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/
芝加哥大学法学院 学院网站
Law School website
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/
人物外：科斯 芝加哥大学网站 Curriculum Vitae
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/coase/cv.html
Curriculum Vitae
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald H. Coase
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
phone: 773-702-7342
EDUCATION
Universite de Paris I
Docteur, (honoris causa), 1996
Beloit College
D.H.L., (honorary), 1996
University of Buckingham, England
D.Sci, (honorary), 1995
University of Dundee, Scotland
LL.D., (honorary), 1992
Washington University in St. Louis
LL.D., (honorary), 1991
Yale University
D. So. Sc., (honorary), 1989
University of Cologne
Dr. Rer. Pol. h.c., 1988
University of London
B. Com. 1932, D.Sc. (Econ.), 1951
London School of Economics
1929 - 1931
Kilburn Grammar School
1923 - 1929
EXPERIENCE
University of Chicago Law School
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics, and Senior Fellow in Law and Economics, 1982 - present
Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics, 1971 - 1981
Professor of Economics, 1964 - 1970
University of Kansas
Distinguished Professor (visiting) of Law and Economics, 1991.
University of Virginia
Professor, 1958 - 1964
University of Buffalo
Professor, 1951 - 1958
London School of Economics
Reader, 1947 - 1951
Lecturer, 1938 - 1947
Assistant Lecturer, 1935 - 1938
University of Liverpool
Assistant Lecturer, 1934 - 1935
Dundee School of Economics and Commerce
Assistant Lecturer, 1932 - 1934
Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholar
1931 - 1932
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Distinguished Fellow, American Economic Association
Honorary Fellow, London School of Economics
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Corresponding Fellow, the British Academy
Membre Titulaire, The European Academy
Law and Economics Center Prize, University of Miami, 1980
D. Francis Bustin Prize, University of Chicago, 1988
Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1991
Curriculum Vitae
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald H. Coase
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
phone: 773-702-7342
EDUCATION
Universite de Paris I
Docteur, (honoris causa), 1996
Beloit College
D.H.L., (honorary), 1996
University of Buckingham, England
D.Sci, (honorary), 1995
University of Dundee, Scotland
LL.D., (honorary), 1992
Washington University in St. Louis
LL.D., (honorary), 1991
Yale University
D. So. Sc., (honorary), 1989
University of Cologne
Dr. Rer. Pol. h.c., 1988
University of London
B. Com. 1932, D.Sc. (Econ.), 1951
London School of Economics
1929 - 1931
Kilburn Grammar School
1923 - 1929
EXPERIENCE
University of Chicago Law School
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics, and Senior Fellow in Law and Economics, 1982 - present
Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics, 1971 - 1981
Professor of Economics, 1964 - 1970
University of Kansas
Distinguished Professor (visiting) of Law and Economics, 1991.
University of Virginia
Professor, 1958 - 1964
University of Buffalo
Professor, 1951 - 1958
London School of Economics
Reader, 1947 - 1951
Lecturer, 1938 - 1947
Assistant Lecturer, 1935 - 1938
University of Liverpool
Assistant Lecturer, 1934 - 1935
Dundee School of Economics and Commerce
Assistant Lecturer, 1932 - 1934
Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholar
1931 - 1932
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Distinguished Fellow, American Economic Association
Honorary Fellow, London School of Economics
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Corresponding Fellow, the British Academy
Membre Titulaire, The European Academy
Law and Economics Center Prize, University of Miami, 1980
D. Francis Bustin Prize, University of Chicago, 1988
Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1991
人物外：科斯 芝加哥大学网站 Publications, Presentations and Works in Progress
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/coase/ppw.html
Publications, Presentations and Works in Progress
Ronald H. CoaseClifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics1111 East 60th StreetChicago, IL 60637phone: 773-702-7342
(Books and Pamphlets Articles Criticism and Discussion Position Papers Videos)
Books and Pamphlets
The Firm, the Market and the Law (Foreign editions: Japanese, 1992, Swedish, 1992, Spanish, 1994, Chinese, 1995, Italian, 1995, French, 1997).
Essays on Economics and Economists (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Essays on the Institutional Structure of Production (Chinese translation, Shanghai, 1990).
The Firm, the Market, and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Educational TV. Who Should Pay? Rational Debate Seminars, American Enterprise Institute (1968) (with Edward W. Barrett).
British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly (Longmans Green, Great Britain; Harvard University Press, United States, 1950).
The Iron and Steel Industry 1926?1935: An Investigation Based on the Accounts of Public Companies, Special Memorandum No. 49 of the London and Cambridge Economic Service (1939) (with R.S. Edwards and R.F. Fowler).
Published Balance Sheets as an Aid to Economic Investigation-Some Difficulties (Accounting Research Association 1938) (with R.S. Edwards and R.F. Fowler).
Articles
“The Conduct of Economics: The Example of Fisher Body and General Motors” 15 Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 255 (2006).
"Why Economics Will Change," Remarks at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, April 4, 2002. International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 1, (2002).
"The Acquisition of Fisher Body by General Motors," 43 Journal of Law and Economics 15 (2000).
"The Task of the Society," Opening Address to the Annual Conference, September 17, 1999. International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 2, Number 2, (Fall 1999).
Interview, International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 2, Number 1, (1999).
Interview, Context, (Fall 1998).
Comment on Thomas W. Hazlett, "Assigning Property Rights to Radio Spectrum Users: Why Did FCC License Auctions Take 67 Years?" 41 Journal of Law and Economics (1998).
"The New Institutional Economics," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings Volume 88, Number 2, pp.72?74, (May, 1998).
"Aaron Director," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law (Paul Newman, ed., 1998).
Foreword, The Theory of Committees and Elections, by Duncan Black and Committee Decisions with Complementary Valuation by Duncan Black and R.A. Newing, revised second editions (Kluwer, 1998).
Interview, Reason, (January, 1997).
Foreword, Firms, Organizations and Contracts, (Peter J. Buckley and Jonathan Michie ed., 1996).
"Law and Economics and A. W. Brian Simpson," 25 Journal of Legal Studies 103, (1996).
"The Problem of Social Costs: The Citations," 71 Chicago-Kent Law Review 809, (1996).
"The Present State of Economics," Lecture given at the University of Buckingham 1995.
"My Evolution as an Economist," in Lives of the Laureates, 227 (1995).
"Law and Economics at Chicago," 36 Journal of Law and Economics 239 (1993).
"Duncan Black 1908?1991," Proceedings of the British Academy 82 (1993).
"Coase on Posner on Coase and Concluding Comment," 149 Zeitschrift fur die gesamte StaatSwissenschaft (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) 96, 360 (1993).
"The Institutional Structure of Production: The 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture in Economic Sciences," Les Prix Nobel and American Economic Review, (September, 1992) and elsewhere.
"Contracts and The Activities of Firms," 34 Journal of Law & Economics 451 (1991).
"George J. Stigler," in Remembering the University of Chicago (Edward Shils ed. 1991).
"Accounting and the Theory of the Firm," 12 Journal of Accounting and Economics 3 (1990).
"Alfred Marshall's Family and Ancestry," in Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, Rita McWilliams Tullberg ed. (1990).
"How Should Economists Choose?" in Ideas, Their Origins and Their Consequences: Lectures to Commemorate the Life and Work of G. Warren Nutter 63 (Thomas Jefferson Center Foundation ed. 1988).
"Blackmail," 74 Virginia Law Review 655 (1988). Also as Occasional Paper No. 24, The Law School, University of Chicago (1988).
"The Nature of The Firm, 1. Origin, 2. Meaning, 3. Influence," 4 Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 3-47 (1988). Reprinted in The Nature of the Firm (Oliver Williamson and Sidney Winter, eds., Oxford University Press, 1990).
"Arnold Plant," in 3 The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics 891 (John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds. 1987).
"Professor Sir Arnold Plant: His Ideas and Influence," in The Unfinished Agenda, Essays in Honour of Arthur Seldon, 79 (1986).
"Alfred Marshall's Mother and Father," 16 History of Political Economy 519 (1984).
"The New Institutional Economics," 140 Zeitschraft fur die gesamte Staat-Swissenschaft (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) 229 (1984).
"George J. Stigler: An Appreciation," 6 Regulation 21 (1982).
"How Should Economists Choose?" G. Warren Nutter Lecture in Political Economy (American Enterprise Institute, 1982).
"Economics at LSE in the 1930s: A Personal View," 10 Atlantic Economic Journal 31 (1982).
"Duncan Black: A Biographical Sketch," in Toward a Science of Politics 1 (G. Tullock ed. 1981).
"The Coase Theorem and the Empty Core: A Comment," 24 Journal of Law & Economics 183 (1981).
"Should the Federal Communications Commission Be Abolished?" in Regulation, Economics and the Law 41 (Bernard H. Siegan ed. 1979) (with Nicholas Johnson).
"Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting," 22 Journal of Law & Economics 269 (1979).
"Economics and Biology: A Comment," 68 American Economic Review 244 (1978).
Introduction, in Armen Alchian, Economic Forces at Work (1977).
"Economics and Contiguous Disciplines," in The Organization and Retrieval of Economic Knowledge (Mark Perlman ed. 1977). Also in 7 Journal of Legal Studies 201 (1978).
"Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1977). Also in Advertising and Free Speech (Allen Hyman & M. Bruce Johnson eds. 1977).
"The Wealth of Nations. An Address by Professor R.H. Coase," Los Angeles, Foundation for Research in Economics and Education, 1976. Also 15 Economic Inquiry 309 (1977).
Introduction to Francis A. Allen, The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with Legal Education. International Institute for Economic Research, (Reprint Paper 3, 1977.)
"Adams Smith's View of Man," 19 Journal of Law & Economics 529 (1976)
"Marshall on Method," 18 Journal of Law & Economics 25 (1975).
"The Choice of the Institutional Framework: A Comment," 17 Journal of Law & Economics 493 (1974).
"The Lighthouse in Economics," 17 Journal of Law & Economics 357 (1974) Also in The Theory of Market Failure 255 (Tyler Cowen ed. 1988).
"Economists and Public Policy," in Large Corporations in a Changing Society (J. Fred Weston ed. 1974).
"The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas," 64 American Economic ,Review, Papers & Proceedings 384 (1974). Also in Price Theory 559 (Harry Townsend ed. 2nd edition 1980).
"The Appointment of Pigou as Marshall's Successor," 15 Journal of Law & Economics 473 (1972).
"Durability and Monopoly," 15 Journal of Law & Economics 143 (1972).
"Industrial Organization: A Proposal for Research," in Policy Issues and Research Opportunities in Industrial Organization (Victor R. Fuchs ed. 1972).
"The Auction System and North Sea Gas: A Comment," 13 Journal of Law & Economics 45 (1970).
"The Theory of Public Utility Pricing and its Application," 1 Bell Journal of Economics 113 (1970).
"Social Cost and Public Policy," in Exploring the Frontiers of Administration (George A. Edwards ed. 1970).
"Consumer's Surplus," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968).
"The Theory of Public Utility Pricing," in The Economics of Regulation of Public Utilities (1966).
"The Economics of Broadcasting and Government Policy," 56 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 440 (1966). Also in The Crisis of the Regulatory Commissions (P.W. McAvoy ed. 1970).
"Evaluation of Public Policy Relating to Radio and Television Broadcasting: Social and Economic Issues," 41 Land Economics 161 (1965).
"The Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee," 5 Journal of Law & Economics 17 (1962).
"The Outreach of Government: At What Point Peril?" Analysis (October 1962).
"The British Post Office and the Messenger Companies," 4 Journal of Law & Economics 12 (1961).
"Why Not Use the Pricing System in the Broadcast Industry?" The Freeman (July 1961).
"The Problem of Social Cost," 3 Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1960). Also in Readings in Microeconomics (William Breit and Harold M. Hochman eds. 1968) and elsewhere.
"The Federal Communications Commission," 2 Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1959). Also in the Yearbook of Broadcasting Articles, Anthology edition (1980) and elsewhere.
"The Postal Monopoly in Great Britain: An Historical Survey," in Economic Essays in Commemoration of the Dundee School of Economics, 1931?55 (J.K. Eastham ed. 1955).
"The Development of the British Television Service," 30 Land Economics 207 (1954).
"The Beveridge Report and Private Enterprise in Broadcasting," The Owl (1951).
"Report on the B.B.C.," Time and Tide (January 20, 1951).
"The B.B.C. Monopoly," Time and Tide (October 7, 1950).
"British Television Policy: Questions of Control and Finance," The [London] Times (September 9, 1950).
"The Nationalization of Electricity Supply in Great Britain," 26 Land Economics 1 (1950).
"Wire Broadcasting in Great Britain," 15 Economica (n.s.) 194 (1948).
"The Origin of the Monopoly of Broadcasting in Great Britain," 14 Economica (n.s.) 189 (1948). Also in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (1950).
"The Economics of Uniform Pricing Systems," 15 The Manchester School Economics and Social Studies 139 (1947).
"The Marginal Cost Controversy: Some Further Comments," 14 Economica (n.s.) 150 (1947).
"Monopoly Pricing with Interrelated Costs and Demands," 13 Economica (n.s.) 278 (1946).
"The Marginal Cost Controversy," 13 Economica (n.s.) 169 (1946).
"B.B.C. Enquiry?" 176 Spectator 446 (1946).
"Price and Output Policy of State Enterprise: A Comment," 55 Economic Journal 112 (1945).
"The Analysis of Producers' Expectations," 7 Economica (n.s.) 280 (1940) (with R.F. Fowler).
"Rowland Hill and the Penny Post," 6 Economica (n.s.) 423 (1939).
"Business Organization and the Accountant," (a series of 12 articles) The Accountant (October-December 1938). Also in Studies in Costing (David Solomons ed. 1952); and in a shortened form under the title "The Nature of Costs," in Studies in Cost Analysis (David Solomons ed. 1968), and elsewhere.
"The Nature of the Firm," 4 Economica (n.s.) 386 (1937). Also in American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory, selected by a Committee of the American Economic Association (1952), and elsewhere.
"Some Notes on Monopoly Price," 5 Review of Economic Studies 17 (1937).
"The Pig?Cycle in Great Britain: An Explanation," 4 Economica 55 (1937) (with R.F. Fowler).
"The Pig?Cycle: A Rejoinder," 2 Economica (n.s.) 423 (1935) (with R.F. Fowler).
"Bacon Production and the Pig?Cycle in Great Britain," 2 Economica (n.s.) 142 (1935) (with R.F. Fowler).
"The Problem of Duopoly Reconsidered," 2 Review of Economic Studies 137 (1935).
Criticism and Discussion
Roundtable Discussion, "The Future of Law and Economics," 64 The University of Chicago Law Review 1132, (Fall 1997).
Comment on Cheung "On the New Institutional Economics" and Panel Discussion Remarks in Contract Economics (Lars Werin and Hans Wijkander eds. 1992).
Comment on "The Muted Voice of the Consumer in Regulatory Agencies," by Colston E. Warne, in A Critique of Administrative Regulation of Public Utilities (W.J. Samuels & H.M. Trebing eds. 1972).
Participation in a discussion by University of Chicago faculty members, Center for Policy Study, "The Legal and Economic Aspects of Pollution," University of Chicago, 1970.
Discussion of "Achieving Efficient Regulation of a Fishery," in Economics of Fisheries Management: A Symposium (A.D. Scott ed 1970). Vancouver, University of British Columbia.
Discussion of "Direct Regulation and Market Performance in the American Economy," by Richard E. Caves; and "The Effectiveness of Economic Regulation: A Legal View," by Roger C. Cramton, 54 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 194 (1964). Also reprinted in revised form in The Crisis of the Regulatory Commissions (P.W. McAvoy ed. 1970).
Comments on "Full Costs, Cost Changes and Prices," and "Characteristics and Types of Price Discrimination," in Universities' National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Business Concentration, and Price Policy (1955).
Discussion of "The Trend of Public Employment in Great Britain and the United States" by Moses Abramovitz and Vera Eliasberg, 43 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 234 (1953).
Position Papers
United States Policy Regarding the Law of the Seas, in Mineral Resources of the Deep Seabed, part 2, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Minerals, Materials and Fuels of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 93rd Cong., 2d sess., at 1160 (March 5, 6, and 11, 1974).
Working Paper for the Task Force on Productivity and Competition: The Conglomerate Merger 115 Congressional Record 15932, 15938 (June 16, 1969). Also in 1 Small Business and the Robinson-Patman Act, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Small Business, 91st Cong., 1st sess., appendix (October 7?9, 1969).
Report by President Nixon's Task Force on Productivity and Competition (George Stigler, chairman 1969).
Videos
Centennial Coase Lecture (April 1, 2003)
"Ronald H. Coase," the Intellectual Portrait Series, Liberty Fund, 2002."Transition in Eastern Europe," Idea Channel, 1995 (with Gary Becker).
"Consumer Behavior," Idea Channel, 1995 (with Gary Becker).
Publications, Presentations and Works in Progress
Ronald H. CoaseClifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics1111 East 60th StreetChicago, IL 60637phone: 773-702-7342
(Books and Pamphlets Articles Criticism and Discussion Position Papers Videos)
Books and Pamphlets
The Firm, the Market and the Law (Foreign editions: Japanese, 1992, Swedish, 1992, Spanish, 1994, Chinese, 1995, Italian, 1995, French, 1997).
Essays on Economics and Economists (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Essays on the Institutional Structure of Production (Chinese translation, Shanghai, 1990).
The Firm, the Market, and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Educational TV. Who Should Pay? Rational Debate Seminars, American Enterprise Institute (1968) (with Edward W. Barrett).
British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly (Longmans Green, Great Britain; Harvard University Press, United States, 1950).
The Iron and Steel Industry 1926?1935: An Investigation Based on the Accounts of Public Companies, Special Memorandum No. 49 of the London and Cambridge Economic Service (1939) (with R.S. Edwards and R.F. Fowler).
Published Balance Sheets as an Aid to Economic Investigation-Some Difficulties (Accounting Research Association 1938) (with R.S. Edwards and R.F. Fowler).
Articles
“The Conduct of Economics: The Example of Fisher Body and General Motors” 15 Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 255 (2006).
"Why Economics Will Change," Remarks at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, April 4, 2002. International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 1, (2002).
"The Acquisition of Fisher Body by General Motors," 43 Journal of Law and Economics 15 (2000).
"The Task of the Society," Opening Address to the Annual Conference, September 17, 1999. International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 2, Number 2, (Fall 1999).
Interview, International Society for New Institutional Economics Newsletter, Volume 2, Number 1, (1999).
Interview, Context, (Fall 1998).
Comment on Thomas W. Hazlett, "Assigning Property Rights to Radio Spectrum Users: Why Did FCC License Auctions Take 67 Years?" 41 Journal of Law and Economics (1998).
"The New Institutional Economics," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings Volume 88, Number 2, pp.72?74, (May, 1998).
"Aaron Director," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law (Paul Newman, ed., 1998).
Foreword, The Theory of Committees and Elections, by Duncan Black and Committee Decisions with Complementary Valuation by Duncan Black and R.A. Newing, revised second editions (Kluwer, 1998).
Interview, Reason, (January, 1997).
Foreword, Firms, Organizations and Contracts, (Peter J. Buckley and Jonathan Michie ed., 1996).
"Law and Economics and A. W. Brian Simpson," 25 Journal of Legal Studies 103, (1996).
"The Problem of Social Costs: The Citations," 71 Chicago-Kent Law Review 809, (1996).
"The Present State of Economics," Lecture given at the University of Buckingham 1995.
"My Evolution as an Economist," in Lives of the Laureates, 227 (1995).
"Law and Economics at Chicago," 36 Journal of Law and Economics 239 (1993).
"Duncan Black 1908?1991," Proceedings of the British Academy 82 (1993).
"Coase on Posner on Coase and Concluding Comment," 149 Zeitschrift fur die gesamte StaatSwissenschaft (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) 96, 360 (1993).
"The Institutional Structure of Production: The 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture in Economic Sciences," Les Prix Nobel and American Economic Review, (September, 1992) and elsewhere.
"Contracts and The Activities of Firms," 34 Journal of Law & Economics 451 (1991).
"George J. Stigler," in Remembering the University of Chicago (Edward Shils ed. 1991).
"Accounting and the Theory of the Firm," 12 Journal of Accounting and Economics 3 (1990).
"Alfred Marshall's Family and Ancestry," in Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, Rita McWilliams Tullberg ed. (1990).
"How Should Economists Choose?" in Ideas, Their Origins and Their Consequences: Lectures to Commemorate the Life and Work of G. Warren Nutter 63 (Thomas Jefferson Center Foundation ed. 1988).
"Blackmail," 74 Virginia Law Review 655 (1988). Also as Occasional Paper No. 24, The Law School, University of Chicago (1988).
"The Nature of The Firm, 1. Origin, 2. Meaning, 3. Influence," 4 Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 3-47 (1988). Reprinted in The Nature of the Firm (Oliver Williamson and Sidney Winter, eds., Oxford University Press, 1990).
"Arnold Plant," in 3 The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics 891 (John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds. 1987).
"Professor Sir Arnold Plant: His Ideas and Influence," in The Unfinished Agenda, Essays in Honour of Arthur Seldon, 79 (1986).
"Alfred Marshall's Mother and Father," 16 History of Political Economy 519 (1984).
"The New Institutional Economics," 140 Zeitschraft fur die gesamte Staat-Swissenschaft (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) 229 (1984).
"George J. Stigler: An Appreciation," 6 Regulation 21 (1982).
"How Should Economists Choose?" G. Warren Nutter Lecture in Political Economy (American Enterprise Institute, 1982).
"Economics at LSE in the 1930s: A Personal View," 10 Atlantic Economic Journal 31 (1982).
"Duncan Black: A Biographical Sketch," in Toward a Science of Politics 1 (G. Tullock ed. 1981).
"The Coase Theorem and the Empty Core: A Comment," 24 Journal of Law & Economics 183 (1981).
"Should the Federal Communications Commission Be Abolished?" in Regulation, Economics and the Law 41 (Bernard H. Siegan ed. 1979) (with Nicholas Johnson).
"Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting," 22 Journal of Law & Economics 269 (1979).
"Economics and Biology: A Comment," 68 American Economic Review 244 (1978).
Introduction, in Armen Alchian, Economic Forces at Work (1977).
"Economics and Contiguous Disciplines," in The Organization and Retrieval of Economic Knowledge (Mark Perlman ed. 1977). Also in 7 Journal of Legal Studies 201 (1978).
"Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1977). Also in Advertising and Free Speech (Allen Hyman & M. Bruce Johnson eds. 1977).
"The Wealth of Nations. An Address by Professor R.H. Coase," Los Angeles, Foundation for Research in Economics and Education, 1976. Also 15 Economic Inquiry 309 (1977).
Introduction to Francis A. Allen, The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with Legal Education. International Institute for Economic Research, (Reprint Paper 3, 1977.)
"Adams Smith's View of Man," 19 Journal of Law & Economics 529 (1976)
"Marshall on Method," 18 Journal of Law & Economics 25 (1975).
"The Choice of the Institutional Framework: A Comment," 17 Journal of Law & Economics 493 (1974).
"The Lighthouse in Economics," 17 Journal of Law & Economics 357 (1974) Also in The Theory of Market Failure 255 (Tyler Cowen ed. 1988).
"Economists and Public Policy," in Large Corporations in a Changing Society (J. Fred Weston ed. 1974).
"The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas," 64 American Economic ,Review, Papers & Proceedings 384 (1974). Also in Price Theory 559 (Harry Townsend ed. 2nd edition 1980).
"The Appointment of Pigou as Marshall's Successor," 15 Journal of Law & Economics 473 (1972).
"Durability and Monopoly," 15 Journal of Law & Economics 143 (1972).
"Industrial Organization: A Proposal for Research," in Policy Issues and Research Opportunities in Industrial Organization (Victor R. Fuchs ed. 1972).
"The Auction System and North Sea Gas: A Comment," 13 Journal of Law & Economics 45 (1970).
"The Theory of Public Utility Pricing and its Application," 1 Bell Journal of Economics 113 (1970).
"Social Cost and Public Policy," in Exploring the Frontiers of Administration (George A. Edwards ed. 1970).
"Consumer's Surplus," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968).
"The Theory of Public Utility Pricing," in The Economics of Regulation of Public Utilities (1966).
"The Economics of Broadcasting and Government Policy," 56 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 440 (1966). Also in The Crisis of the Regulatory Commissions (P.W. McAvoy ed. 1970).
"Evaluation of Public Policy Relating to Radio and Television Broadcasting: Social and Economic Issues," 41 Land Economics 161 (1965).
"The Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee," 5 Journal of Law & Economics 17 (1962).
"The Outreach of Government: At What Point Peril?" Analysis (October 1962).
"The British Post Office and the Messenger Companies," 4 Journal of Law & Economics 12 (1961).
"Why Not Use the Pricing System in the Broadcast Industry?" The Freeman (July 1961).
"The Problem of Social Cost," 3 Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1960). Also in Readings in Microeconomics (William Breit and Harold M. Hochman eds. 1968) and elsewhere.
"The Federal Communications Commission," 2 Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1959). Also in the Yearbook of Broadcasting Articles, Anthology edition (1980) and elsewhere.
"The Postal Monopoly in Great Britain: An Historical Survey," in Economic Essays in Commemoration of the Dundee School of Economics, 1931?55 (J.K. Eastham ed. 1955).
"The Development of the British Television Service," 30 Land Economics 207 (1954).
"The Beveridge Report and Private Enterprise in Broadcasting," The Owl (1951).
"Report on the B.B.C.," Time and Tide (January 20, 1951).
"The B.B.C. Monopoly," Time and Tide (October 7, 1950).
"British Television Policy: Questions of Control and Finance," The [London] Times (September 9, 1950).
"The Nationalization of Electricity Supply in Great Britain," 26 Land Economics 1 (1950).
"Wire Broadcasting in Great Britain," 15 Economica (n.s.) 194 (1948).
"The Origin of the Monopoly of Broadcasting in Great Britain," 14 Economica (n.s.) 189 (1948). Also in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (1950).
"The Economics of Uniform Pricing Systems," 15 The Manchester School Economics and Social Studies 139 (1947).
"The Marginal Cost Controversy: Some Further Comments," 14 Economica (n.s.) 150 (1947).
"Monopoly Pricing with Interrelated Costs and Demands," 13 Economica (n.s.) 278 (1946).
"The Marginal Cost Controversy," 13 Economica (n.s.) 169 (1946).
"B.B.C. Enquiry?" 176 Spectator 446 (1946).
"Price and Output Policy of State Enterprise: A Comment," 55 Economic Journal 112 (1945).
"The Analysis of Producers' Expectations," 7 Economica (n.s.) 280 (1940) (with R.F. Fowler).
"Rowland Hill and the Penny Post," 6 Economica (n.s.) 423 (1939).
"Business Organization and the Accountant," (a series of 12 articles) The Accountant (October-December 1938). Also in Studies in Costing (David Solomons ed. 1952); and in a shortened form under the title "The Nature of Costs," in Studies in Cost Analysis (David Solomons ed. 1968), and elsewhere.
"The Nature of the Firm," 4 Economica (n.s.) 386 (1937). Also in American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory, selected by a Committee of the American Economic Association (1952), and elsewhere.
"Some Notes on Monopoly Price," 5 Review of Economic Studies 17 (1937).
"The Pig?Cycle in Great Britain: An Explanation," 4 Economica 55 (1937) (with R.F. Fowler).
"The Pig?Cycle: A Rejoinder," 2 Economica (n.s.) 423 (1935) (with R.F. Fowler).
"Bacon Production and the Pig?Cycle in Great Britain," 2 Economica (n.s.) 142 (1935) (with R.F. Fowler).
"The Problem of Duopoly Reconsidered," 2 Review of Economic Studies 137 (1935).
Criticism and Discussion
Roundtable Discussion, "The Future of Law and Economics," 64 The University of Chicago Law Review 1132, (Fall 1997).
Comment on Cheung "On the New Institutional Economics" and Panel Discussion Remarks in Contract Economics (Lars Werin and Hans Wijkander eds. 1992).
Comment on "The Muted Voice of the Consumer in Regulatory Agencies," by Colston E. Warne, in A Critique of Administrative Regulation of Public Utilities (W.J. Samuels & H.M. Trebing eds. 1972).
Participation in a discussion by University of Chicago faculty members, Center for Policy Study, "The Legal and Economic Aspects of Pollution," University of Chicago, 1970.
Discussion of "Achieving Efficient Regulation of a Fishery," in Economics of Fisheries Management: A Symposium (A.D. Scott ed 1970). Vancouver, University of British Columbia.
Discussion of "Direct Regulation and Market Performance in the American Economy," by Richard E. Caves; and "The Effectiveness of Economic Regulation: A Legal View," by Roger C. Cramton, 54 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 194 (1964). Also reprinted in revised form in The Crisis of the Regulatory Commissions (P.W. McAvoy ed. 1970).
Comments on "Full Costs, Cost Changes and Prices," and "Characteristics and Types of Price Discrimination," in Universities' National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Business Concentration, and Price Policy (1955).
Discussion of "The Trend of Public Employment in Great Britain and the United States" by Moses Abramovitz and Vera Eliasberg, 43 American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 234 (1953).
Position Papers
United States Policy Regarding the Law of the Seas, in Mineral Resources of the Deep Seabed, part 2, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Minerals, Materials and Fuels of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 93rd Cong., 2d sess., at 1160 (March 5, 6, and 11, 1974).
Working Paper for the Task Force on Productivity and Competition: The Conglomerate Merger 115 Congressional Record 15932, 15938 (June 16, 1969). Also in 1 Small Business and the Robinson-Patman Act, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Small Business, 91st Cong., 1st sess., appendix (October 7?9, 1969).
Report by President Nixon's Task Force on Productivity and Competition (George Stigler, chairman 1969).
Videos
Centennial Coase Lecture (April 1, 2003)
"Ronald H. Coase," the Intellectual Portrait Series, Liberty Fund, 2002."Transition in Eastern Europe," Idea Channel, 1995 (with Gary Becker).
"Consumer Behavior," Idea Channel, 1995 (with Gary Becker).
人物外：科斯 芝加哥大学网站 简介
Ronald H. Coase's page at University of Chicago
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/coase/
Ronald H. Coase
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
phone: 773-702-7342
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald H. Coase’s 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm” was to establish the field of transaction cost economics. “The Problem of Social Cost,” published in 1961, sets out what is now known as the Coase Theorem and a new field in economic research, “law and economics.”
After holding positions at the Dundee School of Economics and the University of Liverpool, R. H. Coase joined the faculty of the London School of Economics in 1935. He continued at the London School of Economics and was appointed Reader in Economics with special reference to public utilities in 1947.
Mr. Coase has held both a Sir Ernest Cassel Traveling Scholarship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. He has also been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. During World War II, he served as a statistician with the Central Statistical Office of the Offices of the British War Cabinet.
In 1951 Mr. Coase migrated to the United States and held positions at the Universities of Buffalo and Virginia prior to coming to the Law School in 1964. He has taught regulated industries and economic analysis and public policy. Mr. Coase was the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1964 to 1982. Among his many publications are The Firm, the Market and the Law (1988) and Essays on Economics and Economists (1994). In 1977 Mr. Coase was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Mr. Coase is a Fellow of the British Academy, the European Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Honour Committee of Euroscience. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Cologne, Yale University, Washington University, the University of Dundee, the University of Buckingham, Beloit College, and the University of Paris.
Coase was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. In 2003, Coase was the winner of The Economist Innovation Award in the category of “No Boundaries.” Coase’s current work continues to look into the complicated nature of the firm. He is also continuing his research into producer’s expectations and natural monopolies.
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/coase/
Ronald H. Coase
Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
phone: 773-702-7342
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald H. Coase’s 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm” was to establish the field of transaction cost economics. “The Problem of Social Cost,” published in 1961, sets out what is now known as the Coase Theorem and a new field in economic research, “law and economics.”
After holding positions at the Dundee School of Economics and the University of Liverpool, R. H. Coase joined the faculty of the London School of Economics in 1935. He continued at the London School of Economics and was appointed Reader in Economics with special reference to public utilities in 1947.
Mr. Coase has held both a Sir Ernest Cassel Traveling Scholarship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. He has also been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. During World War II, he served as a statistician with the Central Statistical Office of the Offices of the British War Cabinet.
In 1951 Mr. Coase migrated to the United States and held positions at the Universities of Buffalo and Virginia prior to coming to the Law School in 1964. He has taught regulated industries and economic analysis and public policy. Mr. Coase was the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1964 to 1982. Among his many publications are The Firm, the Market and the Law (1988) and Essays on Economics and Economists (1994). In 1977 Mr. Coase was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Mr. Coase is a Fellow of the British Academy, the European Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Honour Committee of Euroscience. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Cologne, Yale University, Washington University, the University of Dundee, the University of Buckingham, Beloit College, and the University of Paris.
Coase was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. In 2003, Coase was the winner of The Economist Innovation Award in the category of “No Boundaries.” Coase’s current work continues to look into the complicated nature of the firm. He is also continuing his research into producer’s expectations and natural monopolies.
人物外：科斯 诺贝尔奖网站 Banquet Speech
Banquet Speech
Ronald H. Coase's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1991
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,I have been deeply moved by the honour paid to me by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and by the recognition thus given to the study of the institutional structure of the economy. By drawing attention to the importance of this subject, the Academy has in effect honoured all economists who work in this field. It is my expectation that their researches will greatly increase our understanding of the institutional structure and, by so doing, will aid businessmen in their choice of business practices, will improve government economic policy and in consequence will lead to a more productive economy. It is fashionable in some circles to denigrate greater production but as Arthur Lewis, a Nobel Laureate who, to our great loss, died earlier this year, once reminded us, it is only recently and only in some countries that as a result of the greater productivity of the economy, that women have ceased to be little more than beasts of burden. The task of economists is a humble one but nonetheless essential. Maynard Keynes once said that economists are the trustees not of civilisation but of the possibility of civilisation. If we economists succeed in our task, let us hope that the rest of society will take advantage of the opportunities thus afforded and that a civilised life will be achieved in all countries of the world.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1991, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1992
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1991
Ronald H. Coase's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1991
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,I have been deeply moved by the honour paid to me by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and by the recognition thus given to the study of the institutional structure of the economy. By drawing attention to the importance of this subject, the Academy has in effect honoured all economists who work in this field. It is my expectation that their researches will greatly increase our understanding of the institutional structure and, by so doing, will aid businessmen in their choice of business practices, will improve government economic policy and in consequence will lead to a more productive economy. It is fashionable in some circles to denigrate greater production but as Arthur Lewis, a Nobel Laureate who, to our great loss, died earlier this year, once reminded us, it is only recently and only in some countries that as a result of the greater productivity of the economy, that women have ceased to be little more than beasts of burden. The task of economists is a humble one but nonetheless essential. Maynard Keynes once said that economists are the trustees not of civilisation but of the possibility of civilisation. If we economists succeed in our task, let us hope that the rest of society will take advantage of the opportunities thus afforded and that a civilised life will be achieved in all countries of the world.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1991, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1992
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1991
人物外：科斯 诺贝尔奖网站 Prize Lecture
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1991/coase-lecture.html
Prize Lecture
Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1991
The Institutional Structure of Production
In my long life I have known some great economists but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company. I have made no innovations in high theory. My contribution to economics has been to urge the inclusion in our analysis of features of the economic system so obvious that, like the postman in G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown tale, The Invisible Man, they have tended to be overlooked. Nonetheless, once included in the analysis, they will, as I believe, bring about a complete change in the structure of economic theory, at least in what is called price theory or microeconomics. What I have done is to show the importance for the working of the economic system of what may be termed the institutional structure of production. In this lecture I shall explain why, in my view, these features of the economic system were ignored and why their recognition will lead to a change in the way we analyse the working of the economic system and in the way we think about economic policy, changes which are already beginning to occur. I will also speak about the empirical work that needs to be done if this transformation in our approach is to increase our understanding. In speaking about this transformation, I do not wish to suggest that it is the result of my work alone. Oliver Williamson, Harold Demsetz, Steven Cheung, among others, have made outstanding contributions to the subject and without their work and that of many others, I doubt whether the significance of my writings would have been recognized. While it has been a great advantage of the creation of the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that, by drawing attention to the significance of particular fields of economics, it encourages further research in them, the highlighting of the work of a few scholars, or, in my case, one scholar, tends to obscure the importance of the contributions of other able scholars whose researches have been crucial to the development of the field.
I will be speaking of that part of economics which has come to be called industrial organization, but to understand its present state it is necessary to say something about the development of economics in general. During the two centuries since the publication of The Wealth of Nations the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact. A principal theme of The Wealth of Nations was that government regulation or centralised planning were not necessary to make an economic system function in an orderly way. The economy could be co-ordinated by a system of prices (the "invisible hand") and, furthermore, with beneficial results. A major task of economists since the publication of The Wealth of Nations, as Harold Demsetz has explained1, has been to formalize this proposition of Adam Smith. The given factors are technology and the tastes of consumers, and individuals, who follow their own interest, are governed in their choices by a system of prices. Economists have uncovered the conditions necessary if Adam Smith's results are to be achieved and where, in the real world, such conditions do not appear to be found, they have proposed changes which are designed to bring them about. It is what one finds in the textbooks. Harold Demsetz has said rightly that what this theory analyses is a system of extreme decentralization. It has been a great intellectual achievement and it throws light on many aspects of the economic system. But it has not been by any means all gain. The concentration on the determination of prices has led to a narrowing of focus which has had as a result the neglect of other aspects of the economic system. Sometimes, indeed, it seems as though economists conceive of their subject as being concerned only with the pricing system and that anything outside this is considered as no part of their business. Thus, my old chief and wonderful human being, Lionel Robbins, wrote, in The Nature and Significance of Economic Science, about the "glaring deficiencies" of the old treatment of the theory of production with its discussion of peasant proprietorships and industrial forms: "It suggests that from the point of view of the economist 'organisation' is a matter of internal industrial (or agricultural) arrangement - if not internal to the firm, at any rate internal to 'the' industry. At the same time it tends to leave out completely the governing factor of all productive organisation - the relationship of prices and cost..."2. What this comes down to is that, in Robbins' view, an economist does not interest himself in the internal arrangements within organisations but only in what happens on the market, the purchase of factors of production and the sale of the goods that these factors produce. What happens in between the purchase of the factors of production and the sale of the goods that are produced by these factors is largely ignored. I do not know how far economists today share Robbins' attitude but it is undeniable that microeconomics is largely a study of the determination of prices and output, indeed this part of economics is often called price theory.
This neglect of other aspects of the system has been made easier by another feature of modern economic theory - the growing abstraction of the analysis, which does not seem to call for a detailed knowledge of the actual economic system or, at any rate, has managed to proceed without it. Holmstrom and Tirole, writing on The Theory of the Firm in the recently published Handbook of Industrial Organization, conclude at the end of their article of 63 pages that "the evidence/theory ratio... is currently very low in this field"3. Peltzman has written a scathing review of the Handbook in which he points out how much of the discussion in it is theory without any empirical basis4. What is studied is a system which lives in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result "blackboard economics". The firm and the market appear by name but they lack any substance. The firm in mainstream economic theory has often been described as a "black box". And so it is. This is very extraordinary given that most resources in a modern economic system are employed within firms, with how these resources are used dependent on administrative decisions and not directly on the operation of a market. Consequently, the efficiency of the economic system depends to a very considerable extent on how these organisations conduct their affairs, particularly, of course, the modern corporation. Even more surprising, given their interest in the pricing system, is the neglect of the market or more specifically the institutional arrangements which govern the process of exchange. As these institutional arrangements determine to a large extent what is produced, what we have is a very incomplete theory. All this is beginning to change and in this process I am glad to have played my part. The value of including such institutional factors in the corpus of mainstream economics is made clear by recent events in Eastern Europe. These ex-communist countries are advised to move to a market economy, and their leaders wish to do so, but without the appropriate institutions no market economy of any significance is possible. If we knew more about our own economy we would be in a better position to advise them.
What I endeavoured to do in the two articles cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was to attempt to fill these gaps or more exactly to indicate the direction in which we should move if they are ultimately to be filled. Let me start with The Nature of the Firm. I went as a student to the London School of Economics in 1929 to study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree, specialising in the Industry group, supposedly designed for people who wished to become works managers, a choice of occupation for which I was singularly ill-suited. However, in 1931, I had a great stroke of luck. Arnold Plant was appointed Professor of Commerce in 1930. He was a wonderful teacher. I began to attend his seminar in 1931, some five months before I took the final examinations. It was a revelation. He quoted Sir Arthur Salter: "The normal economic system works itself'. And he explained how a competitive economic system coordinated by prices would lead to the production of goods and services which consumers valued most highly. Before being exposed to Plant's teaching, my notions on how the economy worked were extremely woolly. After Plant's seminar I had a coherent view of the economic system. He introduced me to Adam Smith's "invisible hand". As I had taken the first year of University work while still at High School, I managed to complete the requirements for a degree in two years. However, university regulations required three years of residence before a degree could be granted. I had therefore a year to spare. I then had another stroke of luck. I was awarded a Cassel travelling scholarship by the University of London. I decided to spend the year in the United States, this being treated as a year's residence at the London School of Economics, the regulations being somewhat loosely interpreted.
I decided to study vertical and lateral integration of industry in the United States. Plant had described in his lectures the different ways in which various industries were organised, but we seemed to lack any theory which would explain these differences. I set out to find it. There was also another puzzle which, in my mind, needed to be solved and which seemed to be related to my main project. The view of the pricing system as a co-ordinating mechanism was clearly right but there were aspects of the argument which troubled me. Plant was opposed to all schemes, then very fashionable during the Great Depression, for the co-ordination of industrial production by some form of planning. Competition, according to Plant, acting through a system of prices, would do all the co-ordination necessary. And yet we had a factor of production, management, whose function was to co-ordinate. Why was it needed if the pricing system provided all the co-ordination necessary? The same problem presented itself to me at that time in another guise. The Russian Revolution had taken place only fourteen years earlier. We knew then very little about how planning would actually be carried out in a communist system. Lenin had said that the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory. However, many economists in the West maintained that this was an impossibility. And yet there were factories in the West and some of them were extremely large. How did one reconcile the views expressed by economists on the role of the pricing system and the impossibility of successful central economic planning with the existence of management and of these apparently planned societies, firms, operating within our own economy?5
I found the answer by the summer of 1932. It was to realise that there were costs of using the pricing mechanism. What the prices are has to be discovered. There are negotiations to be undertaken, contracts have to be drawn up, inspections have to be made, arrangements have to be made to settle disputes, and so on. These costs have come to be known as transaction costs. Their existence implies that methods of co-ordination, alternative to the market, which are themselves costly and in various ways imperfect, may nonetheless be preferable to relying on the pricing mechanism, the only method of co-ordination normally analysed by economists. It was avoidance of the costs of carrying out transactions through the market that could explain the existence of the firm in which the allocation of factors came about as a result of administrative decisions (and I thought it did). In my 1937 article, I argued that in a competitive system there would be an optimum of planning since a firm, that little planned society, could only continue to exist if it performed its co-ordination function at a lower cost than would be incurred if it were achieved by means of market transactions and also at a lower cost than this same function could be performed by another firm. To have an efficient economic system it is necessary not only to have markets but also areas of planning within organizations of the appropriate size. What this mix should be we find as a result of competition. This is what I said in my article of 1937. However, as we know from a letter I wrote in 1932, which has been preserved, all the essentials of this argument had been presented in a lecture I gave in Dundee at the beginning of October, 19326. I was then twenty-one years of age and the sun never ceased to shine. I could never have imagined that these ideas would become some 60 years later a major justification for the award of a Nobel Prize. And it is a strange experience to be praised in my eighties for work I did in my twenties.
There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely. The work of Oliver Williamson and others has led to a greater understanding of the factors which govern what a firm does and how it does it. And we can also hope to learn much more in future from the studies of the activities of firms which have recently been initiated by the Center for Economic Studies of the Bureau of the Census of the United States. But it would be wrong to think that the most important consequence for economics of the publication of The Nature of the Firm has been to direct attention to the importance of the firm in our modern economy, a result which, in my view, would have come about in any case. What I think will be considered in future to have been the important contribution of this article is the explicit introduction of transaction costs into economic analysis. I argued in The Nature of the Firm that the existence of transaction costs leads to the emergence of the firm. But the effects are pervasive in the economy. Businessmen in deciding on their ways of doing business and on what to produce have to take into account transaction costs. If the costs of making an exchange are greater than the gains which that exchange would bring, that exchange would not take place and the greater production that would flow from specialisation would not be realised. In this way, transaction costs affect not only contractual arrangements but also what goods and services are produced. Not to include transaction costs in the theory leaves many aspects of the working of the economic system unexplained, including the emergence of the firm, but much else besides. In fact, a large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can freely negotiate and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Hayek has told us.
I know of only one part of economics in which transaction costs have been used to explain a major feature of the economic system and that relates to the evolution and use of money. Adam Smith pointed out the hindrances to commerce that would arise in an economic system in which there was a division of labour but in which all exchange had to take the form of barter. No-one would be able to buy anything unless he possessed something that the producer wanted. This difficulty, he explained, could be overcome by the use of money. A person wishing to buy something in a barter system has to find someone who has this product for sale but who also wants some of the goods possessed by the potential buyer. Similarly, a person wishing to sell something has to find someone who both wants what he has to offer and also possesses something that the potential seller wants. Exchange in a barter system requires what Jevons called "this double coincidence". Clearly the search for partners in exchange with suitable qualifications is likely to be very costly and will prevent many potentially beneficial exchanges from taking place. The benefit brought about by the use of money consists of a reduction in transaction costs. The use of money also reduces transaction costs by facilitating the drawing up of contracts as well as by reducing the quantity of goods that need to be held for purposes of exchange. However, the nature of the benefits secured by the use of money seems to have faded into the background so far as economists are concerned and it does not seem to have been noticed that there are other features of the economic system which exist because of the need to mitigate transaction costs.
I now turn to that other article cited by the Swedish Academy, The Problem of Social Cost, published some 30 years ago. I will not say much here about its influence on legal scholarship which has been immense but will mainly consider its influence on economics, which has not been immense, although I believe that in time it will be. It is my view that the approach used in that article will ultimately transform the structure of microeconomics - and I will explain why. I should add that in writing this article I had no such general aim in mind. I thought that I was exposing the weaknesses of Pigou's analysis of the divergence between private and social products, an analysis generally accepted by economists, and that was all. It was only later, and in part as a result of conversations with Steven Cheung in the 1960s that I came to see the general significance for economic theory of what I had written in that article and also to see more clearly what questions needed to be further investigated.
Pigou's conclusion and that of most economists using standard economic theory was, and perhaps still is, that some kind of government action (usually the imposition of taxes) was required to restrain those whose actions had harmful effects on others, often termed negative externalities. What I showed in that article, as I thought, was that in a regime of zero transaction costs, an assumption of standard economic theory, negotiations between the parties would lead to those arrangements being made which would maximise wealth and this irrespective of the initial assignment of rights. This is the infamous Coase Theorem, named and formulated by Stigler, although it is based on work of mine. Stigler argues that the Coase Theorem follows from the standard assumptions of economic theory. Its logic cannot be questioned, only its domain7. I do not disagree with Stigler. However, I tend to regard the Coase Theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs. The significance to me of the Coase Theorem is that it undermines the Pigovian system. Since standard economic theory assumes transaction costs to be zero, the Coase Theorem demonstrates that the Pigovian solutions are unnecessary in these circumstances. Of course, it does not imply, when transaction costs are positive, that government actions (such as government operation, regulation or taxation, including subsidies) could not produce a better result than relying on negotiations between individuals in the market. Whether this would be so could be discovered not by studying imaginary governments but what real governments actually do. My conclusion; let us study the world of positive transaction costs.
If we move from a regime of zero transaction costs to one of positive transaction costs, what becomes immediately clear is the crucial importance of the legal system in this new world. I explained in The Problem of Social Cost that what are traded on the market are not, as is often supposed by economists, physical entities but the rights to perform certain actions and the rights which individuals possess are established by the legal system. While we can imagine in the hypothetical world of zero transaction costs that the parties to an exchange would negotiate to change any provision of the law which prevents them from taking whatever steps are required to increase the value of production, in the real world of positive transaction costs such a procedure would be extremely costly, and would make unprofitable, even where it was allowed, a great deal of such contracting around the law. Because of this, the rights which individuals possess, with their duties and privileges, will be, to a large extent what the law determines. As a result the legal system will have a profound effect on the working of the economic system and may in certain respects be said to control it. It is obviously desirable that these rights should be assigned to those who can use them most productively and with incentives that lead them to do so and that, to discover and maintain such a distribution of rights, the costs of their transference should be low, through clarity in the law and by making the legal requirements for such transfers less onerous. Since this can come about only if there is an appropriate system of property rights, and they are enforced, it is easy to understand why so many academic lawyers (at least in the United States) have found so attractive the task of uncovering the character of such a property rights system and why the subject of "law and economics" has flourished in American law schools. Indeed, work is going forward at such a pace that I do not consider it over-optimistic to believe that the main outlines of the subject will be drawn within five or ten years.
Until quite recently most economists seem to have been unaware of this relationship between the economic and legal systems except in the most general way. Stock and produce exchanges are often used by economists as examples of perfect or near-perfect competition. But these exchanges regulate in great detail the activities of traders (and this quite apart from any public regulation there may be). What can be traded, when it can be traded, the terms of settlement and so on are all laid down by the authorities of the exchange. There is, in effect, a private law. Without such rules and regulations, the speedy conclusion of trades would not be possible. Of course, when trading takes place outside exchanges (and this is almost all trading) and where the dealers are scattered in space and have very divergent interests, as in retailing and wholesaling, such a private law would be difficult to establish and their activities will be regulated by the laws of the State. It makes little sense for economists to discuss the process of exchange without specifying the institutional setting within which the trading takes place since this affects the incentives to produce and the costs of transacting. I think this is now beginning to be recognized and has been made crystal-clear by what is going on in Eastern Europe today. The time has surely gone in which economists could analyze in great detail two individuals exchanging nuts for berries on the edge of the forest and then feel that their analysis of the process of exchange was complete, illuminating though this analysis may be in certain respects. The process of contracting needs to be studied in a real world setting. We would then learn of the problems that are encountered and of how they are overcome and we would certainly become aware of the richness of the institutional alternatives between which we have to choose.
Oliver Williamson has ascribed the non-use or limited use of my thesis in The Nature of the Firm to the fact that it has not been made "operational", by which he means that the concept of transaction costs has not been incorporated into a general theory. I think this is correct. There have been two reasons for this. First, incorporating transaction costs into standard economic theory which has been based on the assumption that they are zero, would be very difficult and economists who, like most scientists, as Thomas Kuhn has told us, are extremely conservative in their methods, have not been inclined to attempt it. Second, Williamson has also pointed out that although I was correct in making the choice between organization within the firm or through the market the center piece of my analysis, I did not indicate what the factors were that determined the outcome of this choice and thus made it difficult for others to build on what is often described as a "fundamental insight". This also is true. But the interrelationships which govern the mix of market and hierarchy, to use Williamson's terms, are extremely complex and in our present state of ignorance it will not be easy to discover what these factors are. What we need is more empirical work. In a paper written for a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research I explained why I thought this was so. This is what I said: "An inspired theoretician might do as well without such empirical work, but my own feeling is that the inspiration is most likely to come through the stimulus provided by the patterns, puzzles and anomalies revealed by the systematic gathering of data, particularly when the prime need is to break our existing habits of thought"*. This statement was made in 1970. I still think that in essentials it is true today. Although much interesting and important research was done in the seventies and eighties and we certainly know much more than we did in 1970, there is little doubt that a great deal more empirical work is needed. However, I have come to the conclusion that the main obstacle faced by researchers in industrial organization is the lack of available data on contracts and the activities of firms. I have therefore decided to do something about it.
Believing that there is a great deal of data on contracts and the activities of firms in the United States available in government departments and agencies in Washington, D.C., and that this information is largely unknown to economists, I organized a conference at the University of Chicago Law School in the Summer of 1990 at which government officials presented papers in which they described what data was available and how to get access to it and also reported on some of the research being carried out within their departments. The audience consisted of academic economists. It was, as a colleague remarked, a case of supply meeting demand. The proceedings of this conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Another development with which I am associated is the establishment of the Center for the Study of Contracts and the Structure of Enterprise at the Business School of the University of Pittsburgh. This Center will make large-scale collections of business contracts and will prepare databases which will be made available to all researchers, whatever their institution. Nor should we forget the work now getting started at the Center for Economic Studies of the Bureau of the Census. This greater availability of data and the encouragement given to all researchers working on the institutional structure of production by the award to me of the Nobel Prize, should result in a reduction in that elegant but sterile theorizing so commonly found in the economics literature on industrial organization and should lead to studies which increase our understanding of how the real economic system works.
My remarks have sometimes been interpreted as implying that I am hostile to the mathematization of economic theory. This is untrue. Indeed, once we begin to uncover the real factors affecting the performance of the economic system, the complicated interrelations between them will clearly necessitate a mathematical treatment, as in the natural sciences, and economists like myself, who write in prose, will take their bow. May this period soon come.
I am very much aware that many economists whom I respect and admire will not agree with the opinions I have expressed and some may even be offended by them. But a scholar must be content with the knowledge that what is false in what he says will soon be exposed and, as for what is true, he can count on ultimately seeing it accepted, if only he lives long enough.
1. Harold Demsetz, Ownership, Control and the Firm Volume I, page 145.
2. Lionel Robbins, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), page 70.
3. Richard Schmalensee and Robert D. Willig (editors), Handbook of Industrial Organization, page 126.
4. Sam Peltzman, "The Handbook of Industrial Organization: A Review Article", Journal of Political Economy, February, 1991, pages 201-217.
5. A fuller account of these events will be found in Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter (editors), The Nature of the Firm, Origins, Evolution and Development, pages 34-47.
6. Ibid, pages 34-35.
7. George J. Stigler, Two Notes on the Coase Theorem", Yale Law Journal, December, 1989, pages 631-633.
8. R.H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law, page 71.
From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1991-1995, Editor Torsten Persson, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1991
Prize Lecture
Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1991
The Institutional Structure of Production
In my long life I have known some great economists but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company. I have made no innovations in high theory. My contribution to economics has been to urge the inclusion in our analysis of features of the economic system so obvious that, like the postman in G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown tale, The Invisible Man, they have tended to be overlooked. Nonetheless, once included in the analysis, they will, as I believe, bring about a complete change in the structure of economic theory, at least in what is called price theory or microeconomics. What I have done is to show the importance for the working of the economic system of what may be termed the institutional structure of production. In this lecture I shall explain why, in my view, these features of the economic system were ignored and why their recognition will lead to a change in the way we analyse the working of the economic system and in the way we think about economic policy, changes which are already beginning to occur. I will also speak about the empirical work that needs to be done if this transformation in our approach is to increase our understanding. In speaking about this transformation, I do not wish to suggest that it is the result of my work alone. Oliver Williamson, Harold Demsetz, Steven Cheung, among others, have made outstanding contributions to the subject and without their work and that of many others, I doubt whether the significance of my writings would have been recognized. While it has been a great advantage of the creation of the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that, by drawing attention to the significance of particular fields of economics, it encourages further research in them, the highlighting of the work of a few scholars, or, in my case, one scholar, tends to obscure the importance of the contributions of other able scholars whose researches have been crucial to the development of the field.
I will be speaking of that part of economics which has come to be called industrial organization, but to understand its present state it is necessary to say something about the development of economics in general. During the two centuries since the publication of The Wealth of Nations the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact. A principal theme of The Wealth of Nations was that government regulation or centralised planning were not necessary to make an economic system function in an orderly way. The economy could be co-ordinated by a system of prices (the "invisible hand") and, furthermore, with beneficial results. A major task of economists since the publication of The Wealth of Nations, as Harold Demsetz has explained1, has been to formalize this proposition of Adam Smith. The given factors are technology and the tastes of consumers, and individuals, who follow their own interest, are governed in their choices by a system of prices. Economists have uncovered the conditions necessary if Adam Smith's results are to be achieved and where, in the real world, such conditions do not appear to be found, they have proposed changes which are designed to bring them about. It is what one finds in the textbooks. Harold Demsetz has said rightly that what this theory analyses is a system of extreme decentralization. It has been a great intellectual achievement and it throws light on many aspects of the economic system. But it has not been by any means all gain. The concentration on the determination of prices has led to a narrowing of focus which has had as a result the neglect of other aspects of the economic system. Sometimes, indeed, it seems as though economists conceive of their subject as being concerned only with the pricing system and that anything outside this is considered as no part of their business. Thus, my old chief and wonderful human being, Lionel Robbins, wrote, in The Nature and Significance of Economic Science, about the "glaring deficiencies" of the old treatment of the theory of production with its discussion of peasant proprietorships and industrial forms: "It suggests that from the point of view of the economist 'organisation' is a matter of internal industrial (or agricultural) arrangement - if not internal to the firm, at any rate internal to 'the' industry. At the same time it tends to leave out completely the governing factor of all productive organisation - the relationship of prices and cost..."2. What this comes down to is that, in Robbins' view, an economist does not interest himself in the internal arrangements within organisations but only in what happens on the market, the purchase of factors of production and the sale of the goods that these factors produce. What happens in between the purchase of the factors of production and the sale of the goods that are produced by these factors is largely ignored. I do not know how far economists today share Robbins' attitude but it is undeniable that microeconomics is largely a study of the determination of prices and output, indeed this part of economics is often called price theory.
This neglect of other aspects of the system has been made easier by another feature of modern economic theory - the growing abstraction of the analysis, which does not seem to call for a detailed knowledge of the actual economic system or, at any rate, has managed to proceed without it. Holmstrom and Tirole, writing on The Theory of the Firm in the recently published Handbook of Industrial Organization, conclude at the end of their article of 63 pages that "the evidence/theory ratio... is currently very low in this field"3. Peltzman has written a scathing review of the Handbook in which he points out how much of the discussion in it is theory without any empirical basis4. What is studied is a system which lives in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result "blackboard economics". The firm and the market appear by name but they lack any substance. The firm in mainstream economic theory has often been described as a "black box". And so it is. This is very extraordinary given that most resources in a modern economic system are employed within firms, with how these resources are used dependent on administrative decisions and not directly on the operation of a market. Consequently, the efficiency of the economic system depends to a very considerable extent on how these organisations conduct their affairs, particularly, of course, the modern corporation. Even more surprising, given their interest in the pricing system, is the neglect of the market or more specifically the institutional arrangements which govern the process of exchange. As these institutional arrangements determine to a large extent what is produced, what we have is a very incomplete theory. All this is beginning to change and in this process I am glad to have played my part. The value of including such institutional factors in the corpus of mainstream economics is made clear by recent events in Eastern Europe. These ex-communist countries are advised to move to a market economy, and their leaders wish to do so, but without the appropriate institutions no market economy of any significance is possible. If we knew more about our own economy we would be in a better position to advise them.
What I endeavoured to do in the two articles cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was to attempt to fill these gaps or more exactly to indicate the direction in which we should move if they are ultimately to be filled. Let me start with The Nature of the Firm. I went as a student to the London School of Economics in 1929 to study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree, specialising in the Industry group, supposedly designed for people who wished to become works managers, a choice of occupation for which I was singularly ill-suited. However, in 1931, I had a great stroke of luck. Arnold Plant was appointed Professor of Commerce in 1930. He was a wonderful teacher. I began to attend his seminar in 1931, some five months before I took the final examinations. It was a revelation. He quoted Sir Arthur Salter: "The normal economic system works itself'. And he explained how a competitive economic system coordinated by prices would lead to the production of goods and services which consumers valued most highly. Before being exposed to Plant's teaching, my notions on how the economy worked were extremely woolly. After Plant's seminar I had a coherent view of the economic system. He introduced me to Adam Smith's "invisible hand". As I had taken the first year of University work while still at High School, I managed to complete the requirements for a degree in two years. However, university regulations required three years of residence before a degree could be granted. I had therefore a year to spare. I then had another stroke of luck. I was awarded a Cassel travelling scholarship by the University of London. I decided to spend the year in the United States, this being treated as a year's residence at the London School of Economics, the regulations being somewhat loosely interpreted.
I decided to study vertical and lateral integration of industry in the United States. Plant had described in his lectures the different ways in which various industries were organised, but we seemed to lack any theory which would explain these differences. I set out to find it. There was also another puzzle which, in my mind, needed to be solved and which seemed to be related to my main project. The view of the pricing system as a co-ordinating mechanism was clearly right but there were aspects of the argument which troubled me. Plant was opposed to all schemes, then very fashionable during the Great Depression, for the co-ordination of industrial production by some form of planning. Competition, according to Plant, acting through a system of prices, would do all the co-ordination necessary. And yet we had a factor of production, management, whose function was to co-ordinate. Why was it needed if the pricing system provided all the co-ordination necessary? The same problem presented itself to me at that time in another guise. The Russian Revolution had taken place only fourteen years earlier. We knew then very little about how planning would actually be carried out in a communist system. Lenin had said that the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory. However, many economists in the West maintained that this was an impossibility. And yet there were factories in the West and some of them were extremely large. How did one reconcile the views expressed by economists on the role of the pricing system and the impossibility of successful central economic planning with the existence of management and of these apparently planned societies, firms, operating within our own economy?5
I found the answer by the summer of 1932. It was to realise that there were costs of using the pricing mechanism. What the prices are has to be discovered. There are negotiations to be undertaken, contracts have to be drawn up, inspections have to be made, arrangements have to be made to settle disputes, and so on. These costs have come to be known as transaction costs. Their existence implies that methods of co-ordination, alternative to the market, which are themselves costly and in various ways imperfect, may nonetheless be preferable to relying on the pricing mechanism, the only method of co-ordination normally analysed by economists. It was avoidance of the costs of carrying out transactions through the market that could explain the existence of the firm in which the allocation of factors came about as a result of administrative decisions (and I thought it did). In my 1937 article, I argued that in a competitive system there would be an optimum of planning since a firm, that little planned society, could only continue to exist if it performed its co-ordination function at a lower cost than would be incurred if it were achieved by means of market transactions and also at a lower cost than this same function could be performed by another firm. To have an efficient economic system it is necessary not only to have markets but also areas of planning within organizations of the appropriate size. What this mix should be we find as a result of competition. This is what I said in my article of 1937. However, as we know from a letter I wrote in 1932, which has been preserved, all the essentials of this argument had been presented in a lecture I gave in Dundee at the beginning of October, 19326. I was then twenty-one years of age and the sun never ceased to shine. I could never have imagined that these ideas would become some 60 years later a major justification for the award of a Nobel Prize. And it is a strange experience to be praised in my eighties for work I did in my twenties.
There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely. The work of Oliver Williamson and others has led to a greater understanding of the factors which govern what a firm does and how it does it. And we can also hope to learn much more in future from the studies of the activities of firms which have recently been initiated by the Center for Economic Studies of the Bureau of the Census of the United States. But it would be wrong to think that the most important consequence for economics of the publication of The Nature of the Firm has been to direct attention to the importance of the firm in our modern economy, a result which, in my view, would have come about in any case. What I think will be considered in future to have been the important contribution of this article is the explicit introduction of transaction costs into economic analysis. I argued in The Nature of the Firm that the existence of transaction costs leads to the emergence of the firm. But the effects are pervasive in the economy. Businessmen in deciding on their ways of doing business and on what to produce have to take into account transaction costs. If the costs of making an exchange are greater than the gains which that exchange would bring, that exchange would not take place and the greater production that would flow from specialisation would not be realised. In this way, transaction costs affect not only contractual arrangements but also what goods and services are produced. Not to include transaction costs in the theory leaves many aspects of the working of the economic system unexplained, including the emergence of the firm, but much else besides. In fact, a large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can freely negotiate and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Hayek has told us.
I know of only one part of economics in which transaction costs have been used to explain a major feature of the economic system and that relates to the evolution and use of money. Adam Smith pointed out the hindrances to commerce that would arise in an economic system in which there was a division of labour but in which all exchange had to take the form of barter. No-one would be able to buy anything unless he possessed something that the producer wanted. This difficulty, he explained, could be overcome by the use of money. A person wishing to buy something in a barter system has to find someone who has this product for sale but who also wants some of the goods possessed by the potential buyer. Similarly, a person wishing to sell something has to find someone who both wants what he has to offer and also possesses something that the potential seller wants. Exchange in a barter system requires what Jevons called "this double coincidence". Clearly the search for partners in exchange with suitable qualifications is likely to be very costly and will prevent many potentially beneficial exchanges from taking place. The benefit brought about by the use of money consists of a reduction in transaction costs. The use of money also reduces transaction costs by facilitating the drawing up of contracts as well as by reducing the quantity of goods that need to be held for purposes of exchange. However, the nature of the benefits secured by the use of money seems to have faded into the background so far as economists are concerned and it does not seem to have been noticed that there are other features of the economic system which exist because of the need to mitigate transaction costs.
I now turn to that other article cited by the Swedish Academy, The Problem of Social Cost, published some 30 years ago. I will not say much here about its influence on legal scholarship which has been immense but will mainly consider its influence on economics, which has not been immense, although I believe that in time it will be. It is my view that the approach used in that article will ultimately transform the structure of microeconomics - and I will explain why. I should add that in writing this article I had no such general aim in mind. I thought that I was exposing the weaknesses of Pigou's analysis of the divergence between private and social products, an analysis generally accepted by economists, and that was all. It was only later, and in part as a result of conversations with Steven Cheung in the 1960s that I came to see the general significance for economic theory of what I had written in that article and also to see more clearly what questions needed to be further investigated.
Pigou's conclusion and that of most economists using standard economic theory was, and perhaps still is, that some kind of government action (usually the imposition of taxes) was required to restrain those whose actions had harmful effects on others, often termed negative externalities. What I showed in that article, as I thought, was that in a regime of zero transaction costs, an assumption of standard economic theory, negotiations between the parties would lead to those arrangements being made which would maximise wealth and this irrespective of the initial assignment of rights. This is the infamous Coase Theorem, named and formulated by Stigler, although it is based on work of mine. Stigler argues that the Coase Theorem follows from the standard assumptions of economic theory. Its logic cannot be questioned, only its domain7. I do not disagree with Stigler. However, I tend to regard the Coase Theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs. The significance to me of the Coase Theorem is that it undermines the Pigovian system. Since standard economic theory assumes transaction costs to be zero, the Coase Theorem demonstrates that the Pigovian solutions are unnecessary in these circumstances. Of course, it does not imply, when transaction costs are positive, that government actions (such as government operation, regulation or taxation, including subsidies) could not produce a better result than relying on negotiations between individuals in the market. Whether this would be so could be discovered not by studying imaginary governments but what real governments actually do. My conclusion; let us study the world of positive transaction costs.
If we move from a regime of zero transaction costs to one of positive transaction costs, what becomes immediately clear is the crucial importance of the legal system in this new world. I explained in The Problem of Social Cost that what are traded on the market are not, as is often supposed by economists, physical entities but the rights to perform certain actions and the rights which individuals possess are established by the legal system. While we can imagine in the hypothetical world of zero transaction costs that the parties to an exchange would negotiate to change any provision of the law which prevents them from taking whatever steps are required to increase the value of production, in the real world of positive transaction costs such a procedure would be extremely costly, and would make unprofitable, even where it was allowed, a great deal of such contracting around the law. Because of this, the rights which individuals possess, with their duties and privileges, will be, to a large extent what the law determines. As a result the legal system will have a profound effect on the working of the economic system and may in certain respects be said to control it. It is obviously desirable that these rights should be assigned to those who can use them most productively and with incentives that lead them to do so and that, to discover and maintain such a distribution of rights, the costs of their transference should be low, through clarity in the law and by making the legal requirements for such transfers less onerous. Since this can come about only if there is an appropriate system of property rights, and they are enforced, it is easy to understand why so many academic lawyers (at least in the United States) have found so attractive the task of uncovering the character of such a property rights system and why the subject of "law and economics" has flourished in American law schools. Indeed, work is going forward at such a pace that I do not consider it over-optimistic to believe that the main outlines of the subject will be drawn within five or ten years.
Until quite recently most economists seem to have been unaware of this relationship between the economic and legal systems except in the most general way. Stock and produce exchanges are often used by economists as examples of perfect or near-perfect competition. But these exchanges regulate in great detail the activities of traders (and this quite apart from any public regulation there may be). What can be traded, when it can be traded, the terms of settlement and so on are all laid down by the authorities of the exchange. There is, in effect, a private law. Without such rules and regulations, the speedy conclusion of trades would not be possible. Of course, when trading takes place outside exchanges (and this is almost all trading) and where the dealers are scattered in space and have very divergent interests, as in retailing and wholesaling, such a private law would be difficult to establish and their activities will be regulated by the laws of the State. It makes little sense for economists to discuss the process of exchange without specifying the institutional setting within which the trading takes place since this affects the incentives to produce and the costs of transacting. I think this is now beginning to be recognized and has been made crystal-clear by what is going on in Eastern Europe today. The time has surely gone in which economists could analyze in great detail two individuals exchanging nuts for berries on the edge of the forest and then feel that their analysis of the process of exchange was complete, illuminating though this analysis may be in certain respects. The process of contracting needs to be studied in a real world setting. We would then learn of the problems that are encountered and of how they are overcome and we would certainly become aware of the richness of the institutional alternatives between which we have to choose.
Oliver Williamson has ascribed the non-use or limited use of my thesis in The Nature of the Firm to the fact that it has not been made "operational", by which he means that the concept of transaction costs has not been incorporated into a general theory. I think this is correct. There have been two reasons for this. First, incorporating transaction costs into standard economic theory which has been based on the assumption that they are zero, would be very difficult and economists who, like most scientists, as Thomas Kuhn has told us, are extremely conservative in their methods, have not been inclined to attempt it. Second, Williamson has also pointed out that although I was correct in making the choice between organization within the firm or through the market the center piece of my analysis, I did not indicate what the factors were that determined the outcome of this choice and thus made it difficult for others to build on what is often described as a "fundamental insight". This also is true. But the interrelationships which govern the mix of market and hierarchy, to use Williamson's terms, are extremely complex and in our present state of ignorance it will not be easy to discover what these factors are. What we need is more empirical work. In a paper written for a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research I explained why I thought this was so. This is what I said: "An inspired theoretician might do as well without such empirical work, but my own feeling is that the inspiration is most likely to come through the stimulus provided by the patterns, puzzles and anomalies revealed by the systematic gathering of data, particularly when the prime need is to break our existing habits of thought"*. This statement was made in 1970. I still think that in essentials it is true today. Although much interesting and important research was done in the seventies and eighties and we certainly know much more than we did in 1970, there is little doubt that a great deal more empirical work is needed. However, I have come to the conclusion that the main obstacle faced by researchers in industrial organization is the lack of available data on contracts and the activities of firms. I have therefore decided to do something about it.
Believing that there is a great deal of data on contracts and the activities of firms in the United States available in government departments and agencies in Washington, D.C., and that this information is largely unknown to economists, I organized a conference at the University of Chicago Law School in the Summer of 1990 at which government officials presented papers in which they described what data was available and how to get access to it and also reported on some of the research being carried out within their departments. The audience consisted of academic economists. It was, as a colleague remarked, a case of supply meeting demand. The proceedings of this conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Another development with which I am associated is the establishment of the Center for the Study of Contracts and the Structure of Enterprise at the Business School of the University of Pittsburgh. This Center will make large-scale collections of business contracts and will prepare databases which will be made available to all researchers, whatever their institution. Nor should we forget the work now getting started at the Center for Economic Studies of the Bureau of the Census. This greater availability of data and the encouragement given to all researchers working on the institutional structure of production by the award to me of the Nobel Prize, should result in a reduction in that elegant but sterile theorizing so commonly found in the economics literature on industrial organization and should lead to studies which increase our understanding of how the real economic system works.
My remarks have sometimes been interpreted as implying that I am hostile to the mathematization of economic theory. This is untrue. Indeed, once we begin to uncover the real factors affecting the performance of the economic system, the complicated interrelations between them will clearly necessitate a mathematical treatment, as in the natural sciences, and economists like myself, who write in prose, will take their bow. May this period soon come.
I am very much aware that many economists whom I respect and admire will not agree with the opinions I have expressed and some may even be offended by them. But a scholar must be content with the knowledge that what is false in what he says will soon be exposed and, as for what is true, he can count on ultimately seeing it accepted, if only he lives long enough.
1. Harold Demsetz, Ownership, Control and the Firm Volume I, page 145.
2. Lionel Robbins, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), page 70.
3. Richard Schmalensee and Robert D. Willig (editors), Handbook of Industrial Organization, page 126.
4. Sam Peltzman, "The Handbook of Industrial Organization: A Review Article", Journal of Political Economy, February, 1991, pages 201-217.
5. A fuller account of these events will be found in Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter (editors), The Nature of the Firm, Origins, Evolution and Development, pages 34-47.
6. Ibid, pages 34-35.
7. George J. Stigler, Two Notes on the Coase Theorem", Yale Law Journal, December, 1989, pages 631-633.
8. R.H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law, page 71.
From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1991-1995, Editor Torsten Persson, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1991
人物外：科斯 诺贝尔奖网站 Autobiography
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1991/coase-autobio.html
Autobiography
My father, a methodical man, recorded in his diary that I was born at 3:25 p.m. on December 29th, 1910. The place was a house, containing two flats of which my parents occupied the lower, in a suburb of London, Willesden. My father was a telegraphist in the Post Office. My mother had been employed in the Post Office but ceased to work on being married. Both my parents had left school at the age of 12 but were completely literate. However, they had no interest in academic scholarship. Their interest was in sport. My mother played tennis until an advanced age. My father, who played football, cricket and tennis while young, played (lawn) bowls until his death. He was a good player, played for his county and won a number of competitions. He wrote articles on bowls for the local newspaper and for Bowls News.I had the usual boy's interest in sport but my main interest was always academic. I was an only child but although often alone, I was never lonely. When I learnt chess, I was happy to play the role of each player in turn. Lacking guidance, my reading (in books borrowed from the local public library) was undiscriminating and, as I now realize, I was unable to distinguish the charlatan from the serious scholar. My mother taught me to be honest and truthful and although it is impossible to escape some degree of self-deception, my endeavours to follow her precepts have, I believe, lent some strength to my writing. My mother's hero was Captain Oates, who, returning with Scott from the South Pole and finding that his illness was hampering the others, told his companions that he was going for a stroll, went out into a blizzard and was never heard of again. I have always felt that I should not be a bother to others but in this I have not always succeeded.Aged 11, I was taken by my father to a phrenologist. What the phrenologist said about my character was, I feel sure, determined less by the shape of my skull than by the impressions he derived from my behaviour. Out of the various printed summaries of character in his booklet, that chosen for "Master Ronald Coase" started: "You are in possession of much intelligence, and you know it, though you may be inclined to underrate your abilities." This printed summary also included the following remarks: "You will not float down, like a sickly fish, with the tide... you enjoy considerable mental vigour and are not a passive instrument in the hands of others. Though you can work with others and for others, where you see it to your advantage, you are more inclined to think and work for yourself. A little more determination would be to your advantage, however." In the written comments, the pursuits recommended were: "Scientific and commercial banking, accountancy. Also, horticulture and poultry-rearing as hobbies." Added were some comments about my character: "More hope, confidence and concentration required - not suited for the aggressive competitive side of business life. More active ambition would be beneficial." It was also noted that I was too cautious. It was hardly to be expected that this timid little boy would one day be the recipient of a Nobel Prize. That this happened was the result of a series of accidents.As a young boy I suffered from a weakness in my legs, which necessitated, or was thought to necessitate, the wearing of irons on my legs. As a result I went to the school for physical defectives run by the local council. For reasons that I do not remember I missed taking the entrance examinations for the local secondary school at the usual age of 11. However, as the result of the efforts of my parents I was allowed to take the secondary school scholarship examination at the age of 12. The only thing I now remember is that at the oral examination I caused some amusement by referring to a character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Macvolio. However, this lapse was not fatal and I was awarded a scholarship to go to the Kilburn Grammar School. The teaching there was good and I received a solid education. I particularly remember our geography teacher, Charles Thurston, who introduced us to Wegener's hypothesis on the movements of the continents long before it was generally accepted and who also took us to lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, one of which, on river meanders, discussed the effect of the earth's rotation on the course of rivers. I took the matriculation examination in 1927, which I passed, with distinction in history and chemistry.It was then possible to spend the two years after matriculation at the Kilburn Grammar School studying for the intermediate examination of the University of London as an external student, which covered the work which would have been taken during the first year at the University as an internal student. I then had to decide what degree to take. The answer was in fact determined by one of those accidental factors which seem to have shaped my life. My inclination was to take a degree in history, but I found that to do this I would have to know Latin and having arrived at the Kilburn Grammar School at 12 instead of 11, there had been no possibility of my studying Latin. So I turned to the other subject in which I had secured distinction and started to study for a science degree, specialising in chemistry. However, I soon found that mathematics, a requirement for a science degree, was not to my taste and I switched to the only other degree for which it was possible to study at the Kilburn Grammar School, one in commerce. Although my knowledge of the subjects on which I was examined was rudimentary, I managed to pass the intermediate examinations and went to the London School of Economics in October, 1929 to continue my studies for a Bachelor of Commerce degree. I took a hodgepodge of courses for Part I of the final examination, which I passed in 1930.For Part II, I specialised in the Industry Group. I then had an extraordinary stroke of luck, another accidental factor which would affect everything I was to do subsequently. Arnold Plant, who had previously held a chair at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was appointed Professor of Commerce (with special reference to Business Administration) at the London School of Economics in 1930. I attended his lectures on business administration but it was what he said in his seminar, which I started to attend only five months before the final examinations, that was to change my view of the working of the economic system, or perhaps more accurately was to give me one. What Plant did was to introduce me to Adam Smith's "invisible hand". He made me aware of how a competitive economic system could be coordinated by the pricing system. But he did not merely influence my ideas. My encountering him changed my life. I passed the B. Com, Part II final examination in 1931, but having taken the first year of University work while still at school and three years residence at the London School of Economics being required before a degree could be awarded, I had to decide what to do in this third year. Among the subjects studied for Part II, the one I had found most interesting was Industrial Law and what I had decided to do was to study in this third year for the degree of B.Sc. (Econ), with Industrial Law as my special subject. Had I done so I would undoubtedly have gone on to become a lawyer. But that was not to be. No doubt as a result of Plant's influence, the University of London awarded me a Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholarship and although I did not know it, I was on the road to becoming an economist.I spent the academic year 1931-32 on my Cassel Travelling Scholarship in the United States studying the structure of American industries, with the aim of discovering why industries were organized in different ways. I carried out this project mainly by visiting factories and businesses. What came out of my enquiries was not a complete theory answering the questions with which I started but the introduction of a new concept into economic analysis, transaction costs, and an explanation of why there are firms. All this was achieved by the Summer of 1932, as the contents of a lecture delivered in Dundee in October 1932, make clear. These ideas became the basis for my article "The Nature of the Firm", published in 1937, cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in awarding me the 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The delay in publishing my ideas was partly due to a reluctance to rush into print and partly to the fact that I was heavily engaged in teaching and research on other projects. I held a teaching position at the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce from 1932 to 1934, at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1935 and at the London School of Economics from 1935 on. At the London School of Economics I was assigned a course on the economics of public utilities in Britain. In 1939, the Second World War broke out and in 1940 I entered government service doing statistical work, first at the Forestry Commission and then at the Central Statistical Office, Offices of the War Cabinet. I returned to the London School of Economics in 1946. I then became responsible for the main economics course, "The Principles of Economics", and also continued with my research on public utilities, particularly the Post Office and broadcasting. I spent nine months in 1948 in the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship studying the American broadcasting industry. My book, British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly, was published in 1950.In 1951, I migrated to the United States. I went first to the University of Buffalo and in 1959, after a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, I joined the economics department of the University of Virginia. I maintained my interest in public utilities and particularly in broadcasting and during my year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, I made a study of the Federal Communications Commission which regulated the broadcasting industry in the United States, including the allocation of the radio frequency spectrum. I wrote an article, published in 1959, which discussed the procedures followed by the Commission and suggested that it would be better if use of the spectrum was determined by the pricing system and was awarded to the highest bidder. This raised the question of what rights would be acquired by the successful bidder and I went on to discuss the rationale of a property rights system. Part of my argument was considered to be erroneous by a number of economists at the University of Chicago and it was arranged that I should meet with them one evening at Aaron Director's home. What ensued has been described by Stigler and others. I persuaded these economists that I was right and I was asked to write up my argument for publication in the Journal of Law and Economics. Although the main points were already to be found in The Federal Communications Commission, I wrote another article, The Problem of Social Cost, in which I expounded my views at greater length, more precisely and without reference to my previous article. This article, which appeared early in 1961, unlike my earlier article on "The Nature of the Firm", was an instant success. It was, and continues to be, much discussed. Indeed it is probably the most widely cited article in the whole of the modern economic literature. It, and The Nature of the Firm were the two articles cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as justification for awarding me the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize. Had it not been for the fact that these economists at the University of Chicago thought that I had made an error in my article on The Federal Communications Commission, it is probable that The Problem of Social Cost would never have been written.In 1964, I moved to the University of Chicago and became editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. I continued as editor until 1982. Editorship of the journal was a source of great satisfaction. I encouraged economists and lawyers to write about the way in which actual markets operated and about how governments actually perform in regulating or undertaking economic activities. The journal was a major factor in creating the new subject, "law and economics". My life has been interesting, concerned with academic affairs and on the whole successful. But, on almost all occasions, what I have done has been determined by factors which were no part of my choosing. I have had "greatness thrust upon me".
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1991, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1992
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Autobiography
My father, a methodical man, recorded in his diary that I was born at 3:25 p.m. on December 29th, 1910. The place was a house, containing two flats of which my parents occupied the lower, in a suburb of London, Willesden. My father was a telegraphist in the Post Office. My mother had been employed in the Post Office but ceased to work on being married. Both my parents had left school at the age of 12 but were completely literate. However, they had no interest in academic scholarship. Their interest was in sport. My mother played tennis until an advanced age. My father, who played football, cricket and tennis while young, played (lawn) bowls until his death. He was a good player, played for his county and won a number of competitions. He wrote articles on bowls for the local newspaper and for Bowls News.I had the usual boy's interest in sport but my main interest was always academic. I was an only child but although often alone, I was never lonely. When I learnt chess, I was happy to play the role of each player in turn. Lacking guidance, my reading (in books borrowed from the local public library) was undiscriminating and, as I now realize, I was unable to distinguish the charlatan from the serious scholar. My mother taught me to be honest and truthful and although it is impossible to escape some degree of self-deception, my endeavours to follow her precepts have, I believe, lent some strength to my writing. My mother's hero was Captain Oates, who, returning with Scott from the South Pole and finding that his illness was hampering the others, told his companions that he was going for a stroll, went out into a blizzard and was never heard of again. I have always felt that I should not be a bother to others but in this I have not always succeeded.Aged 11, I was taken by my father to a phrenologist. What the phrenologist said about my character was, I feel sure, determined less by the shape of my skull than by the impressions he derived from my behaviour. Out of the various printed summaries of character in his booklet, that chosen for "Master Ronald Coase" started: "You are in possession of much intelligence, and you know it, though you may be inclined to underrate your abilities." This printed summary also included the following remarks: "You will not float down, like a sickly fish, with the tide... you enjoy considerable mental vigour and are not a passive instrument in the hands of others. Though you can work with others and for others, where you see it to your advantage, you are more inclined to think and work for yourself. A little more determination would be to your advantage, however." In the written comments, the pursuits recommended were: "Scientific and commercial banking, accountancy. Also, horticulture and poultry-rearing as hobbies." Added were some comments about my character: "More hope, confidence and concentration required - not suited for the aggressive competitive side of business life. More active ambition would be beneficial." It was also noted that I was too cautious. It was hardly to be expected that this timid little boy would one day be the recipient of a Nobel Prize. That this happened was the result of a series of accidents.As a young boy I suffered from a weakness in my legs, which necessitated, or was thought to necessitate, the wearing of irons on my legs. As a result I went to the school for physical defectives run by the local council. For reasons that I do not remember I missed taking the entrance examinations for the local secondary school at the usual age of 11. However, as the result of the efforts of my parents I was allowed to take the secondary school scholarship examination at the age of 12. The only thing I now remember is that at the oral examination I caused some amusement by referring to a character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Macvolio. However, this lapse was not fatal and I was awarded a scholarship to go to the Kilburn Grammar School. The teaching there was good and I received a solid education. I particularly remember our geography teacher, Charles Thurston, who introduced us to Wegener's hypothesis on the movements of the continents long before it was generally accepted and who also took us to lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, one of which, on river meanders, discussed the effect of the earth's rotation on the course of rivers. I took the matriculation examination in 1927, which I passed, with distinction in history and chemistry.It was then possible to spend the two years after matriculation at the Kilburn Grammar School studying for the intermediate examination of the University of London as an external student, which covered the work which would have been taken during the first year at the University as an internal student. I then had to decide what degree to take. The answer was in fact determined by one of those accidental factors which seem to have shaped my life. My inclination was to take a degree in history, but I found that to do this I would have to know Latin and having arrived at the Kilburn Grammar School at 12 instead of 11, there had been no possibility of my studying Latin. So I turned to the other subject in which I had secured distinction and started to study for a science degree, specialising in chemistry. However, I soon found that mathematics, a requirement for a science degree, was not to my taste and I switched to the only other degree for which it was possible to study at the Kilburn Grammar School, one in commerce. Although my knowledge of the subjects on which I was examined was rudimentary, I managed to pass the intermediate examinations and went to the London School of Economics in October, 1929 to continue my studies for a Bachelor of Commerce degree. I took a hodgepodge of courses for Part I of the final examination, which I passed in 1930.For Part II, I specialised in the Industry Group. I then had an extraordinary stroke of luck, another accidental factor which would affect everything I was to do subsequently. Arnold Plant, who had previously held a chair at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was appointed Professor of Commerce (with special reference to Business Administration) at the London School of Economics in 1930. I attended his lectures on business administration but it was what he said in his seminar, which I started to attend only five months before the final examinations, that was to change my view of the working of the economic system, or perhaps more accurately was to give me one. What Plant did was to introduce me to Adam Smith's "invisible hand". He made me aware of how a competitive economic system could be coordinated by the pricing system. But he did not merely influence my ideas. My encountering him changed my life. I passed the B. Com, Part II final examination in 1931, but having taken the first year of University work while still at school and three years residence at the London School of Economics being required before a degree could be awarded, I had to decide what to do in this third year. Among the subjects studied for Part II, the one I had found most interesting was Industrial Law and what I had decided to do was to study in this third year for the degree of B.Sc. (Econ), with Industrial Law as my special subject. Had I done so I would undoubtedly have gone on to become a lawyer. But that was not to be. No doubt as a result of Plant's influence, the University of London awarded me a Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholarship and although I did not know it, I was on the road to becoming an economist.I spent the academic year 1931-32 on my Cassel Travelling Scholarship in the United States studying the structure of American industries, with the aim of discovering why industries were organized in different ways. I carried out this project mainly by visiting factories and businesses. What came out of my enquiries was not a complete theory answering the questions with which I started but the introduction of a new concept into economic analysis, transaction costs, and an explanation of why there are firms. All this was achieved by the Summer of 1932, as the contents of a lecture delivered in Dundee in October 1932, make clear. These ideas became the basis for my article "The Nature of the Firm", published in 1937, cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in awarding me the 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The delay in publishing my ideas was partly due to a reluctance to rush into print and partly to the fact that I was heavily engaged in teaching and research on other projects. I held a teaching position at the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce from 1932 to 1934, at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1935 and at the London School of Economics from 1935 on. At the London School of Economics I was assigned a course on the economics of public utilities in Britain. In 1939, the Second World War broke out and in 1940 I entered government service doing statistical work, first at the Forestry Commission and then at the Central Statistical Office, Offices of the War Cabinet. I returned to the London School of Economics in 1946. I then became responsible for the main economics course, "The Principles of Economics", and also continued with my research on public utilities, particularly the Post Office and broadcasting. I spent nine months in 1948 in the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship studying the American broadcasting industry. My book, British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly, was published in 1950.In 1951, I migrated to the United States. I went first to the University of Buffalo and in 1959, after a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, I joined the economics department of the University of Virginia. I maintained my interest in public utilities and particularly in broadcasting and during my year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, I made a study of the Federal Communications Commission which regulated the broadcasting industry in the United States, including the allocation of the radio frequency spectrum. I wrote an article, published in 1959, which discussed the procedures followed by the Commission and suggested that it would be better if use of the spectrum was determined by the pricing system and was awarded to the highest bidder. This raised the question of what rights would be acquired by the successful bidder and I went on to discuss the rationale of a property rights system. Part of my argument was considered to be erroneous by a number of economists at the University of Chicago and it was arranged that I should meet with them one evening at Aaron Director's home. What ensued has been described by Stigler and others. I persuaded these economists that I was right and I was asked to write up my argument for publication in the Journal of Law and Economics. Although the main points were already to be found in The Federal Communications Commission, I wrote another article, The Problem of Social Cost, in which I expounded my views at greater length, more precisely and without reference to my previous article. This article, which appeared early in 1961, unlike my earlier article on "The Nature of the Firm", was an instant success. It was, and continues to be, much discussed. Indeed it is probably the most widely cited article in the whole of the modern economic literature. It, and The Nature of the Firm were the two articles cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as justification for awarding me the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize. Had it not been for the fact that these economists at the University of Chicago thought that I had made an error in my article on The Federal Communications Commission, it is probable that The Problem of Social Cost would never have been written.In 1964, I moved to the University of Chicago and became editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. I continued as editor until 1982. Editorship of the journal was a source of great satisfaction. I encouraged economists and lawyers to write about the way in which actual markets operated and about how governments actually perform in regulating or undertaking economic activities. The journal was a major factor in creating the new subject, "law and economics". My life has been interesting, concerned with academic affairs and on the whole successful. But, on almost all occasions, what I have done has been determined by factors which were no part of my choosing. I have had "greatness thrust upon me".
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1991, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1992
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
人物外：科斯 Coase 1910- wiki百科 互动百科
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http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E7%A7%91%E6%96%AF&variant=zh-cn
罗纳德·科斯
维基百科，自由的百科全书
(重定向自科斯)
罗纳德·哈利·科斯（Ronald Harry Coase，1910年12月29日－），英国经济学家，交易成本理论及科斯定理的提出者，对产权理论、法律经济学与新制度经济学有极大贡献，1991年获得诺贝尔经济学奖。科斯获英国伦敦经济学院博士学位，移居美国后主要任教于芝加哥大学。
科斯有两篇著名的论文：
《企业的性质》（The Nature of the Firm (1937)），该文通过交易成本的概念来解释企业的规模。
《社会成本问题》（The Problem of Social Cost (1960)），认为完善的产权界定可以解决外部性问题。（参见科斯定理）。
科斯的交易成本学说被威廉姆森（Oliver E. Williamson）引入到现代组织理论中而且现在十分有影响力。
科斯也因其在《联邦通讯委员会》（The Federal Communications Commission (1959)）一文中批评了频率执照制度，并提出财产权作为更有效率的频率分配方案而被称为频率政策改革之父
参见
芝加哥经济学派
张五常
科斯定理
外部连接
传记
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互动百科
“http://www.hudong.com/wiki/罗纳德·哈里·科斯”
罗纳德·哈里·科斯,1910年12月29日出生于伦敦的威尔斯登。新制度经济学的鼻祖，因为对经济的体制结构取得突破性的研究成果，成为1991年诺贝尔经济学奖的获得者。他的杰出贡献是发现并阐明了交换成本和产权在经济组织和制度结构中的重要性及其在经济活动中的作用。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-生平简介
罗纳德·哈里·科斯1910年，12月29日罗纳德·哈里·科斯出生于伦敦的威尔斯登。科斯是个有腿疾的男孩子，常需要在腿上附加铁制的零件。
1929年，10月进入伦敦经济学院，在那里他遇到了对他有重要影响的老师——以前在南非开普敦大学任教授的阿诺德·普兰特。
1931年，通过了商学士考试并获得一笔欧奈斯特·卡塞尔爵士旅行奖学金。依靠卡塞尔旅行奖学金，科斯在美国度过了1931—1932学年，那时他研究美国工业的结构。
1934—1935年，他在利物浦大学作为助理讲师任教;
1935年以后，科斯在伦敦经济学院教书。在伦敦经济学院，他被指定讲授公用事业经济学，为此他开始对英国公用事业作了一系列历史研究。
1940年，科斯进政政府做统计工作，先在森林委员会，然后在中央统计局、战时内阁办公室工作。
1946年，他回到伦敦经济学院，负责教授主要经济学课程——经济学原理，并且继续对公用事业特别是邮局和广播事业的研究。
1950年，科斯借助于一笔洛克菲勒研究员经费在美国花费了9个月研究美国广播业，出版了《美国广播业：垄断的研究》。
1951年，科斯获得伦敦大学理学博士学位，同年移居美国。
1959年，加入弗吉尼亚大学经济学系，期间科斯对联邦通信委员会作了研究。
1964年以后，科斯一直担任芝加哥大学教授和《法学与经济学杂志》主编。现已退休，任该校荣誉经济学教授和高级法学与经济学研究员。
1978年，科斯当选为美国方理研究院研究员。
1979年，被授予“美国经济学会杰出会员”称号。目前，他在芝加哥大学法学院作为法律与经济学方面的一名高级研究员，在研究工作上仍然十分活跃。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-学术成就
按照瑞典皇家科学院的公告，1991年诺贝尔经济学奖的获得罗纳德·哈里·科斯的主要学术贡献在于，揭示了“交易价值”在经济组织结构的产权和功能中的重要性。他的杰出贡献是发现并阐明了交换成本和产权在经济组织和制度结构中的重要性及其在经济活动中的作用。
诺贝尔经济学奖科斯的代表作是两篇著名的论文。其一是1937年发表的《企业的本质》 ，该文独辟蹊径地讨论了产业企业存在的原因及其扩展规模的界限问题，科斯创造了“交易成本”（Transaction Costs）这一重要的范畴来予以解释。所谓交易成本，即“利用价格机制的费用”或“利用市场的交换手段进行交易的费用”，包括提供价格的费用、讨价还价的费用、订立和执行合同的费用等。科斯认为，当市场交易成本高于企业内部的管理协调成本时，企业便产生了，企业的存在正是为了节约市场交易费用，即用费用较低的企业内交易代替费用较高的市场交易；当市场交易的边际成本等于企业内部的管理协调的边际成本时，就是企业规模扩张的界限。另一篇著名论文是1960年发表的《社会成本问题》 ，该文重新研究了交易成本为零时合约行为的特征，批评了庇古关于“外部性”问题的补偿原则（政府干预），并论证了在产权明确的前提下，市场交易即使在出现社会成本（即外部性）的场合也同样有效。科斯发现，一旦假定交易成本为零，而且对产权（指财产使用权，即运行和操作中的财产权利）界定是清晰的，那么法律范并不影响合约行为的结果，即最优化结果保持不变。换言之，只要交易成本为零，那么无论产权归谁，都可以通过市场自由交易达到资源的最佳配置。斯蒂格勒（1982年诺贝尔经济学奖得主）将科斯的这一思想概括为“在完全竞争条件下，私人成本等于社会成本”，并命名为“科斯定理”。科斯被认为是新制度经济学的鼻祖。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯是产权理论的创始人，早在1937年，在以他的本科论文为基础发表的《公司的性质》一文中，就阐明了该理论的一些基本概念，人们至今仍应为他当时的洞察力深感惊奇。但该书完在以后，并没有得到人们的太多关注。沉默了近三十年，产权理论才受到重视。八十年代后随着自由放任思想潮的高涨，产权理论受到高度评价，科斯也正是因此获得诺贝尔经济学奖。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-主要思想
科斯定理
科斯定理最早体现在1959年10月号《法律经济学》杂志上发表的《联邦通讯委员会》一文。在这篇文章中，科斯以无线电频率为例，对产权进行了经济分析，创造性地提出了下列观点：
产权是重要的。在政府管制前，造成无线电领域争夺频率的混乱状况的真正原因不是频率数量有限，也不是竞争机制失灵而需要政府管制，而是因为没有建立无线电频率的产权制度。同频率一样，土地、资金也都是稀缺资源，但它们本身并不要求政府管制。有些机制，如常用的价格机制，被用来确定如何在众多提出权利要求的人之间配置稀缺资源，如土地可以通过价格机制分配给土地使用者。但是，如果没有建立土地产权制度，任何人都可以占用土地，那么社会会发生混乱，价格机制起不了作用，其原因是因为没有可供交易的产权。对资源不设置产权，企业制度就不能正常运行。
资源的市场配置优于政府配置。资源配置应当由市场力量而不是由政府决策决定。除了政治压力所导致的错误配置外，一个试图取代价格机制功能的行政机构将会碰到两大难题：首先是缺乏本应由市场决定收益与成本的货币量化标准；其次，行政机构实际上不可能拥有每个商业经营者使用或可能使用无线电频率的所有信息，也不了解消费者对运用无线电频率提供的产品或劳务的偏好。不过，这也并不意味着行政分配必然劣于价格机制分配。市场运行不是没有成本，如果市场运行的成本大大超过行政机构运行的成本，人们就可能会默认行政配置造成的失误。
法律要明确界定产权。新发现的山洞是属于发现它的人，还是属于山洞入口处的土地所有者，或是属于山洞顶上的土地所有者，这无疑取决于财产法，但是法律只规定想获得山洞使用权的人必须与山洞的所有权者签约。至于山洞是用来贮藏银行账簿，贮存天然气，还是种植蘑菇，这与财产法没有关系，而与银行、天然气公司和蘑菇种植者为使用山洞而支付费用的多寡有关。法律制度的目标之一就是建立明晰的权利界限，使权利能在此基础上通过市场进行转移和重新组合，应当允许一个使用者买下他人的权利以独占使用权。
使用一种资源与使用对这种资源的权利在分析上没有区别。以“斯特古斯诉布里奇曼案”为例，制糖商机器的噪声与震动干扰了隔壁医生的工作，法院必须决定，医生是否有权强迫制糖商安装新机器或挪动旧机器，或者制糖商是否有权强迫医生另择诊所。从这个案例的分析中可以看出：①在这种情况下，制止甲对乙的损害，不可避免地就会损害甲本身，问题在于如何避免比较严重的损害；②权利的界定是市场交易的基本前提，一旦建立了当事人的法律权利，那么只要有迹象表明谈判花费的成本有利于问题的解决，谈判就能够改变法律程序，产值最大化的最终结果与法律判决无关，目标不应该是干扰最小，而应该是产出最大。所有的产权都会干扰利用资源的能力，但必须保证从干扰中获得的收益大于产生的危害。
有损害的行为不但不影响产权的引入，而且由于利益冲突发生在个人之间，反倒使明晰产权成为必要和可能。比方说，邻近频率间的干扰的减少可能要花钱改善设备，如果邻近频率的经营权不明确，就很难指望一个频率的用户会为他人的利益花费这类成本。产权明晰（第一次配置）加上价格制度（第二次配置）将会解决这类冲突。只要信号受干扰的台主获得的收益大于因受干扰而遭受的损失，或者大于他为抵消干扰而支付的费用，那么即使他有权制止干扰，也会放弃这个权利；而干扰他人的台主为获得经营许可，自然愿意支付费用，但不能高于停止干扰导致的成本或不能以干扰他人的方式继续经营而造成的损失。同样，只要收益大于干扰成本或因干扰被禁止而蒙受的损失，那么即使他有权干扰他人也会放弃这个权利；受干扰的台主为使干扰停止，愿意支付费用，但不得高于因受干扰而遭受的损失或为消除干扰而花费的成本，无论哪一种情况，结果都一样。
如果受损害很多，就很难通过市场来解决。当在众多的共同经营者或组织之间必须通过市场形式进行产权转移时，谈判过程可能会非常费时和困难，从而使这种转移实际上不可能，即使通过法院来行使权力也不容易。在这种市场因成本太高而无法运行的情况下，强制实行规定人们应该做什么和不应该做什么的管制可能会好一些。
社会成本问题
亚当·斯密“看不见的手”的定理的成立要依赖于一个隐含的假定：单个消费者或生产者的经济行为对社会上其他人的福利没有影响，即不存在所谓“外部影响”。换句话说，单个经济单位从其经济行为中产生的私人成本和私人利益被看成等于该行为所造成的社会成本和社会利益。但是，在实际经济中，这个假定往往往并不能够成立。在很多时候，某个人（生产者或消费者）的一项经济活动会给社会上其他成员带来好处，但他自己却不能由此而得到补偿。此时，这个人从其活动中得到的私人利益就小于该活动所带来的社会利益。这种性质的外部影响被称为所谓的“外部经济”。另一方面，在很多时候，某个人的一项经济活动会给社会上其他成员带来危害，但他自己却并不为此而支付足够抵偿这种危害的成本。此时，这个人为其活动所付出的私人成本就小于该活动所造成的社会成本。这种性质的外部影响被称为所谓“外部不经济”。
科斯在《社会成本问题》一文中所述的就是第二种情况，即对他人产生有害影响的工商企业的行为（如工厂放出的烟尘对邻居的影响）。对这种情况，传统经济分析遵循庇古在《福利经济学》中提出的观点，抓住私人产品和社会产品的矛盾，得出了要排烟的厂主赔偿损失，或对他课征“庇古”税，或令他迁走的纠正办法，而科斯认为，把这种问题归结为由于甲损害乙，所以应该制止甲的传统做法，错误地掩盖了问题的实质。实际上这种外部效应问题具有相互性，又称不兼容性。避免甲对乙的损害，将会使甲遭受损害，必须解决的真正问题是允许甲损害乙，还是允许乙制止损害，关键在于避免较严重的损害，并且应当从总体的和边际的角度来认识问题。科斯以养牛者走失的牛损坏毗邻的农夫土地上种植的谷物一例作为分析的起点，假设了这样两种相反的情况：一种情况是令养牛者对损害负责任，也就是说，农夫有谷物不受损害的权利，养牛者没有让牛损害谷物的权利，不然，就要赔偿全部损失。在这种情况下，只要付费，奶牛能吃谷，牛群的规模应是牛多吃谷物增加的价值恰好等于谷物的边际损失。另一种情况是养牛者对损害不负责任，也就是说，他有让牛吃谷物的权利，不必赔偿由此造成的损害。在这种情况下，由于农夫可将谷物损失的价值转移给养牛者，所以牛群的规模不会增加。通过简化的算术例子，科斯引出了以下结论：“有必要知道损害方是否对引起的损失负责，因为如果没有这种权利的初始界定，就不存在权利转让和重新组合的市场交易。但是，如果定价制度的运行毫无成本，最终的结果（产值最大化）是不受法律状况影响的。”换句话说，如果交易成本为零，那么在引起损害的企业对损害结果不承担责任情况下的资源配置就同该企业承担责任时的情况一样。
为了进一步阐明其论点，并表明其普遍适用性，科斯接着又分析了“斯特奇诉布里奇曼”、“库克诉福布斯”、“布赖思诉勒菲弗”和“巴斯诉雷戈里”四案，并再次强调，“在市场交易成本为零时，法院关于损害责任的判决对资源的配置没有影响”，“应该记住，法院面临的迫切问题不是谁做什么，而是谁有权做什么。通过市场交易修改最初的合法界定通常是可能的。当然，如果这种市场交易是无成本的，那么通常会出现对权利的重新安排，假如这种安排会导致产值增加的话”。这些表述，其实就是后来被称作“中性的科斯定理”（Neutrality Version of Coase Theorem）的内容。按照参托·维尔加诺斯基的看法，这个定理隐含的假定前提还包括：
自愿交换是互惠的斯密定理；
完全的知识（生产、利润和效用函数等）；
竞争市场；
最大化目标；
免费的法律制度；
无策略行为；
无财富效应。
然而，科斯本人却不愿停留在这个交易成本为零的所谓的科斯世界里。他在1980年发表的《〈社会成本问题〉的注释》一文中指出，科斯世界正是他极力说服经济学家离开的世界，传统经济学错就错在忽略了交易成本。人们应该研究存在正交易成本的现实世界，在这个世界中，法律制度至关重要。由于市场中交易的东西不是像传统经济学所认为的实物，而是采取的行动和个人拥有的、由法律设置的权利，所以在交易费用为正的现实世界上，法律制度将会对经济体系的运行产生深远的影响。权利应该配置给那些能最富有生产性地使用它们的人，应该探索这样一种有效的产权制度。如果不对交易赖以进行的制度详细地加以规定，新古典经济学关于交换过程的讨论就毫无意义。
在《社会成本问题》的后几节里，科斯进入了正交易成本的世界：首先，发现交易对象，交流交易愿望和方式，谈判、缔约和履约都有成本；其次，如果这些成本大于权利调整带来的产值增加，禁令或赔偿就可能使权利的市场调整停止或不发生，因此，合法权利的初始界定会对经济运行的效率产生影响；再次，这时有利的权利调整也要由法律来确定，不然，转移和合并权利的高成本会使最佳配置和最大产值无法实现；最后，经济组织能以低于市场的成本获得有效的结果。这里有三种情况：一是由企业取代市场来配置资源——由于企业获得了所有各方面的合法权利，所以在企业内部，要素组合中的讨价还价被取消，行政指令取代了市场交易，企业活动的重新安排不再是用契约对权利进行调整的结果，而是行政决定的结果。二是政府直接管制，这不是制定可由市场调整权利的法律，而是强制规定人们必须做什么和不许做什么，并要求人们必须服从。政府作为“超级企业”所拥有的权威可以减除不少麻烦，但这种办法也有成本，只有在其他办法无效时才会被采用。三是法院直接影响经济行为。法院在判决时就应该了解和考虑判决对经济的影响，显然，即使在科斯世界里，这样做也能减少交易成本和节约资源，但应明白，法院做出的实际上是关于资源使用的经济判决，这就启示人们，在界定权利这种属于法律范畴的问题上，经济学也大有用武之地。
科斯在该文结束时指出，土地所有者实际拥有的是实施一定行为的权利，对个人权利无限制的制度实际上就是无权利的制度，权利也是生产要素，在设计经济运行制度时，应该考虑总成本和总效果。这些意见的确耐人寻味，发人深思。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-主要著作
《社会成本问题》《企业的本质》（1937年）；
《边际成本争论》（1946年）；
《美国广播业：垄断的研究》（1950年）；
《联邦通讯委员会》（1959年）；
《社会成本问题》（1960年）；
《经济学中的灯塔问题》（1975年）；
《企业、市场与法律》（1988年）。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-相关词条
经济学 法律学 伦敦大学 芝加哥大学 诺贝尔经济学奖 亚当·斯密
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-参考资料
1.http://www.topo100.com/tjdy/YJ4/2007-06-22/32747.html（中国智囊风云榜）
2.http://money.163.com/07/1012/14/3QK15S1200252E8H.html（网易网）
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E7%A7%91%E6%96%AF&variant=zh-cn
罗纳德·科斯
维基百科，自由的百科全书
(重定向自科斯)
罗纳德·哈利·科斯（Ronald Harry Coase，1910年12月29日－），英国经济学家，交易成本理论及科斯定理的提出者，对产权理论、法律经济学与新制度经济学有极大贡献，1991年获得诺贝尔经济学奖。科斯获英国伦敦经济学院博士学位，移居美国后主要任教于芝加哥大学。
科斯有两篇著名的论文：
《企业的性质》（The Nature of the Firm (1937)），该文通过交易成本的概念来解释企业的规模。
《社会成本问题》（The Problem of Social Cost (1960)），认为完善的产权界定可以解决外部性问题。（参见科斯定理）。
科斯的交易成本学说被威廉姆森（Oliver E. Williamson）引入到现代组织理论中而且现在十分有影响力。
科斯也因其在《联邦通讯委员会》（The Federal Communications Commission (1959)）一文中批评了频率执照制度，并提出财产权作为更有效率的频率分配方案而被称为频率政策改革之父
参见
芝加哥经济学派
张五常
科斯定理
外部连接
传记
__________________________________________________
互动百科
“http://www.hudong.com/wiki/罗纳德·哈里·科斯”
罗纳德·哈里·科斯,1910年12月29日出生于伦敦的威尔斯登。新制度经济学的鼻祖，因为对经济的体制结构取得突破性的研究成果，成为1991年诺贝尔经济学奖的获得者。他的杰出贡献是发现并阐明了交换成本和产权在经济组织和制度结构中的重要性及其在经济活动中的作用。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-生平简介
罗纳德·哈里·科斯1910年，12月29日罗纳德·哈里·科斯出生于伦敦的威尔斯登。科斯是个有腿疾的男孩子，常需要在腿上附加铁制的零件。
1929年，10月进入伦敦经济学院，在那里他遇到了对他有重要影响的老师——以前在南非开普敦大学任教授的阿诺德·普兰特。
1931年，通过了商学士考试并获得一笔欧奈斯特·卡塞尔爵士旅行奖学金。依靠卡塞尔旅行奖学金，科斯在美国度过了1931—1932学年，那时他研究美国工业的结构。
1934—1935年，他在利物浦大学作为助理讲师任教;
1935年以后，科斯在伦敦经济学院教书。在伦敦经济学院，他被指定讲授公用事业经济学，为此他开始对英国公用事业作了一系列历史研究。
1940年，科斯进政政府做统计工作，先在森林委员会，然后在中央统计局、战时内阁办公室工作。
1946年，他回到伦敦经济学院，负责教授主要经济学课程——经济学原理，并且继续对公用事业特别是邮局和广播事业的研究。
1950年，科斯借助于一笔洛克菲勒研究员经费在美国花费了9个月研究美国广播业，出版了《美国广播业：垄断的研究》。
1951年，科斯获得伦敦大学理学博士学位，同年移居美国。
1959年，加入弗吉尼亚大学经济学系，期间科斯对联邦通信委员会作了研究。
1964年以后，科斯一直担任芝加哥大学教授和《法学与经济学杂志》主编。现已退休，任该校荣誉经济学教授和高级法学与经济学研究员。
1978年，科斯当选为美国方理研究院研究员。
1979年，被授予“美国经济学会杰出会员”称号。目前，他在芝加哥大学法学院作为法律与经济学方面的一名高级研究员，在研究工作上仍然十分活跃。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-学术成就
按照瑞典皇家科学院的公告，1991年诺贝尔经济学奖的获得罗纳德·哈里·科斯的主要学术贡献在于，揭示了“交易价值”在经济组织结构的产权和功能中的重要性。他的杰出贡献是发现并阐明了交换成本和产权在经济组织和制度结构中的重要性及其在经济活动中的作用。
诺贝尔经济学奖科斯的代表作是两篇著名的论文。其一是1937年发表的《企业的本质》 ，该文独辟蹊径地讨论了产业企业存在的原因及其扩展规模的界限问题，科斯创造了“交易成本”（Transaction Costs）这一重要的范畴来予以解释。所谓交易成本，即“利用价格机制的费用”或“利用市场的交换手段进行交易的费用”，包括提供价格的费用、讨价还价的费用、订立和执行合同的费用等。科斯认为，当市场交易成本高于企业内部的管理协调成本时，企业便产生了，企业的存在正是为了节约市场交易费用，即用费用较低的企业内交易代替费用较高的市场交易；当市场交易的边际成本等于企业内部的管理协调的边际成本时，就是企业规模扩张的界限。另一篇著名论文是1960年发表的《社会成本问题》 ，该文重新研究了交易成本为零时合约行为的特征，批评了庇古关于“外部性”问题的补偿原则（政府干预），并论证了在产权明确的前提下，市场交易即使在出现社会成本（即外部性）的场合也同样有效。科斯发现，一旦假定交易成本为零，而且对产权（指财产使用权，即运行和操作中的财产权利）界定是清晰的，那么法律范并不影响合约行为的结果，即最优化结果保持不变。换言之，只要交易成本为零，那么无论产权归谁，都可以通过市场自由交易达到资源的最佳配置。斯蒂格勒（1982年诺贝尔经济学奖得主）将科斯的这一思想概括为“在完全竞争条件下，私人成本等于社会成本”，并命名为“科斯定理”。科斯被认为是新制度经济学的鼻祖。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯是产权理论的创始人，早在1937年，在以他的本科论文为基础发表的《公司的性质》一文中，就阐明了该理论的一些基本概念，人们至今仍应为他当时的洞察力深感惊奇。但该书完在以后，并没有得到人们的太多关注。沉默了近三十年，产权理论才受到重视。八十年代后随着自由放任思想潮的高涨，产权理论受到高度评价，科斯也正是因此获得诺贝尔经济学奖。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-主要思想
科斯定理
科斯定理最早体现在1959年10月号《法律经济学》杂志上发表的《联邦通讯委员会》一文。在这篇文章中，科斯以无线电频率为例，对产权进行了经济分析，创造性地提出了下列观点：
产权是重要的。在政府管制前，造成无线电领域争夺频率的混乱状况的真正原因不是频率数量有限，也不是竞争机制失灵而需要政府管制，而是因为没有建立无线电频率的产权制度。同频率一样，土地、资金也都是稀缺资源，但它们本身并不要求政府管制。有些机制，如常用的价格机制，被用来确定如何在众多提出权利要求的人之间配置稀缺资源，如土地可以通过价格机制分配给土地使用者。但是，如果没有建立土地产权制度，任何人都可以占用土地，那么社会会发生混乱，价格机制起不了作用，其原因是因为没有可供交易的产权。对资源不设置产权，企业制度就不能正常运行。
资源的市场配置优于政府配置。资源配置应当由市场力量而不是由政府决策决定。除了政治压力所导致的错误配置外，一个试图取代价格机制功能的行政机构将会碰到两大难题：首先是缺乏本应由市场决定收益与成本的货币量化标准；其次，行政机构实际上不可能拥有每个商业经营者使用或可能使用无线电频率的所有信息，也不了解消费者对运用无线电频率提供的产品或劳务的偏好。不过，这也并不意味着行政分配必然劣于价格机制分配。市场运行不是没有成本，如果市场运行的成本大大超过行政机构运行的成本，人们就可能会默认行政配置造成的失误。
法律要明确界定产权。新发现的山洞是属于发现它的人，还是属于山洞入口处的土地所有者，或是属于山洞顶上的土地所有者，这无疑取决于财产法，但是法律只规定想获得山洞使用权的人必须与山洞的所有权者签约。至于山洞是用来贮藏银行账簿，贮存天然气，还是种植蘑菇，这与财产法没有关系，而与银行、天然气公司和蘑菇种植者为使用山洞而支付费用的多寡有关。法律制度的目标之一就是建立明晰的权利界限，使权利能在此基础上通过市场进行转移和重新组合，应当允许一个使用者买下他人的权利以独占使用权。
使用一种资源与使用对这种资源的权利在分析上没有区别。以“斯特古斯诉布里奇曼案”为例，制糖商机器的噪声与震动干扰了隔壁医生的工作，法院必须决定，医生是否有权强迫制糖商安装新机器或挪动旧机器，或者制糖商是否有权强迫医生另择诊所。从这个案例的分析中可以看出：①在这种情况下，制止甲对乙的损害，不可避免地就会损害甲本身，问题在于如何避免比较严重的损害；②权利的界定是市场交易的基本前提，一旦建立了当事人的法律权利，那么只要有迹象表明谈判花费的成本有利于问题的解决，谈判就能够改变法律程序，产值最大化的最终结果与法律判决无关，目标不应该是干扰最小，而应该是产出最大。所有的产权都会干扰利用资源的能力，但必须保证从干扰中获得的收益大于产生的危害。
有损害的行为不但不影响产权的引入，而且由于利益冲突发生在个人之间，反倒使明晰产权成为必要和可能。比方说，邻近频率间的干扰的减少可能要花钱改善设备，如果邻近频率的经营权不明确，就很难指望一个频率的用户会为他人的利益花费这类成本。产权明晰（第一次配置）加上价格制度（第二次配置）将会解决这类冲突。只要信号受干扰的台主获得的收益大于因受干扰而遭受的损失，或者大于他为抵消干扰而支付的费用，那么即使他有权制止干扰，也会放弃这个权利；而干扰他人的台主为获得经营许可，自然愿意支付费用，但不能高于停止干扰导致的成本或不能以干扰他人的方式继续经营而造成的损失。同样，只要收益大于干扰成本或因干扰被禁止而蒙受的损失，那么即使他有权干扰他人也会放弃这个权利；受干扰的台主为使干扰停止，愿意支付费用，但不得高于因受干扰而遭受的损失或为消除干扰而花费的成本，无论哪一种情况，结果都一样。
如果受损害很多，就很难通过市场来解决。当在众多的共同经营者或组织之间必须通过市场形式进行产权转移时，谈判过程可能会非常费时和困难，从而使这种转移实际上不可能，即使通过法院来行使权力也不容易。在这种市场因成本太高而无法运行的情况下，强制实行规定人们应该做什么和不应该做什么的管制可能会好一些。
社会成本问题
亚当·斯密“看不见的手”的定理的成立要依赖于一个隐含的假定：单个消费者或生产者的经济行为对社会上其他人的福利没有影响，即不存在所谓“外部影响”。换句话说，单个经济单位从其经济行为中产生的私人成本和私人利益被看成等于该行为所造成的社会成本和社会利益。但是，在实际经济中，这个假定往往往并不能够成立。在很多时候，某个人（生产者或消费者）的一项经济活动会给社会上其他成员带来好处，但他自己却不能由此而得到补偿。此时，这个人从其活动中得到的私人利益就小于该活动所带来的社会利益。这种性质的外部影响被称为所谓的“外部经济”。另一方面，在很多时候，某个人的一项经济活动会给社会上其他成员带来危害，但他自己却并不为此而支付足够抵偿这种危害的成本。此时，这个人为其活动所付出的私人成本就小于该活动所造成的社会成本。这种性质的外部影响被称为所谓“外部不经济”。
科斯在《社会成本问题》一文中所述的就是第二种情况，即对他人产生有害影响的工商企业的行为（如工厂放出的烟尘对邻居的影响）。对这种情况，传统经济分析遵循庇古在《福利经济学》中提出的观点，抓住私人产品和社会产品的矛盾，得出了要排烟的厂主赔偿损失，或对他课征“庇古”税，或令他迁走的纠正办法，而科斯认为，把这种问题归结为由于甲损害乙，所以应该制止甲的传统做法，错误地掩盖了问题的实质。实际上这种外部效应问题具有相互性，又称不兼容性。避免甲对乙的损害，将会使甲遭受损害，必须解决的真正问题是允许甲损害乙，还是允许乙制止损害，关键在于避免较严重的损害，并且应当从总体的和边际的角度来认识问题。科斯以养牛者走失的牛损坏毗邻的农夫土地上种植的谷物一例作为分析的起点，假设了这样两种相反的情况：一种情况是令养牛者对损害负责任，也就是说，农夫有谷物不受损害的权利，养牛者没有让牛损害谷物的权利，不然，就要赔偿全部损失。在这种情况下，只要付费，奶牛能吃谷，牛群的规模应是牛多吃谷物增加的价值恰好等于谷物的边际损失。另一种情况是养牛者对损害不负责任，也就是说，他有让牛吃谷物的权利，不必赔偿由此造成的损害。在这种情况下，由于农夫可将谷物损失的价值转移给养牛者，所以牛群的规模不会增加。通过简化的算术例子，科斯引出了以下结论：“有必要知道损害方是否对引起的损失负责，因为如果没有这种权利的初始界定，就不存在权利转让和重新组合的市场交易。但是，如果定价制度的运行毫无成本，最终的结果（产值最大化）是不受法律状况影响的。”换句话说，如果交易成本为零，那么在引起损害的企业对损害结果不承担责任情况下的资源配置就同该企业承担责任时的情况一样。
为了进一步阐明其论点，并表明其普遍适用性，科斯接着又分析了“斯特奇诉布里奇曼”、“库克诉福布斯”、“布赖思诉勒菲弗”和“巴斯诉雷戈里”四案，并再次强调，“在市场交易成本为零时，法院关于损害责任的判决对资源的配置没有影响”，“应该记住，法院面临的迫切问题不是谁做什么，而是谁有权做什么。通过市场交易修改最初的合法界定通常是可能的。当然，如果这种市场交易是无成本的，那么通常会出现对权利的重新安排，假如这种安排会导致产值增加的话”。这些表述，其实就是后来被称作“中性的科斯定理”（Neutrality Version of Coase Theorem）的内容。按照参托·维尔加诺斯基的看法，这个定理隐含的假定前提还包括：
自愿交换是互惠的斯密定理；
完全的知识（生产、利润和效用函数等）；
竞争市场；
最大化目标；
免费的法律制度；
无策略行为；
无财富效应。
然而，科斯本人却不愿停留在这个交易成本为零的所谓的科斯世界里。他在1980年发表的《〈社会成本问题〉的注释》一文中指出，科斯世界正是他极力说服经济学家离开的世界，传统经济学错就错在忽略了交易成本。人们应该研究存在正交易成本的现实世界，在这个世界中，法律制度至关重要。由于市场中交易的东西不是像传统经济学所认为的实物，而是采取的行动和个人拥有的、由法律设置的权利，所以在交易费用为正的现实世界上，法律制度将会对经济体系的运行产生深远的影响。权利应该配置给那些能最富有生产性地使用它们的人，应该探索这样一种有效的产权制度。如果不对交易赖以进行的制度详细地加以规定，新古典经济学关于交换过程的讨论就毫无意义。
在《社会成本问题》的后几节里，科斯进入了正交易成本的世界：首先，发现交易对象，交流交易愿望和方式，谈判、缔约和履约都有成本；其次，如果这些成本大于权利调整带来的产值增加，禁令或赔偿就可能使权利的市场调整停止或不发生，因此，合法权利的初始界定会对经济运行的效率产生影响；再次，这时有利的权利调整也要由法律来确定，不然，转移和合并权利的高成本会使最佳配置和最大产值无法实现；最后，经济组织能以低于市场的成本获得有效的结果。这里有三种情况：一是由企业取代市场来配置资源——由于企业获得了所有各方面的合法权利，所以在企业内部，要素组合中的讨价还价被取消，行政指令取代了市场交易，企业活动的重新安排不再是用契约对权利进行调整的结果，而是行政决定的结果。二是政府直接管制，这不是制定可由市场调整权利的法律，而是强制规定人们必须做什么和不许做什么，并要求人们必须服从。政府作为“超级企业”所拥有的权威可以减除不少麻烦，但这种办法也有成本，只有在其他办法无效时才会被采用。三是法院直接影响经济行为。法院在判决时就应该了解和考虑判决对经济的影响，显然，即使在科斯世界里，这样做也能减少交易成本和节约资源，但应明白，法院做出的实际上是关于资源使用的经济判决，这就启示人们，在界定权利这种属于法律范畴的问题上，经济学也大有用武之地。
科斯在该文结束时指出，土地所有者实际拥有的是实施一定行为的权利，对个人权利无限制的制度实际上就是无权利的制度，权利也是生产要素，在设计经济运行制度时，应该考虑总成本和总效果。这些意见的确耐人寻味，发人深思。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-主要著作
《社会成本问题》《企业的本质》（1937年）；
《边际成本争论》（1946年）；
《美国广播业：垄断的研究》（1950年）；
《联邦通讯委员会》（1959年）；
《社会成本问题》（1960年）；
《经济学中的灯塔问题》（1975年）；
《企业、市场与法律》（1988年）。
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-相关词条
经济学 法律学 伦敦大学 芝加哥大学 诺贝尔经济学奖 亚当·斯密
罗纳德·哈里·科斯-参考资料
1.http://www.topo100.com/tjdy/YJ4/2007-06-22/32747.html（中国智囊风云榜）
2.http://money.163.com/07/1012/14/3QK15S1200252E8H.html（网易网）
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