Ronald Coase Quotes

I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.

You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.

I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.

Ronald Coase, in his classic 1937 paper on 'The Nature of the Firm,' was the first to bring the concept of transaction costs to bear on the study of firm and market organization.

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

When consumers do not take full advantage of efficiency gains, it is because they are weighing other factors that influence their decision making. When the federal government arbitrarily places one of those factors over others, it makes consumers worse off.

I recognized that information was, in many respects, like a public good, and it was this insight that made it clear to me that it was unlikely that the private market would provide efficient resource allocations whenever information was endogenous.

The lens of contract focuses predominantly on gains from trade whereas orthodoxy is focused on resource allocation.

I do not think we can get any legislation this session for extension of land grants unless we pay more for it than it is worth.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things

Henry George espouses wild and illogical doctrines.

Capitalism is a wonderful economic engine, but it assigns little value to long-term projects or societal problems.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

Classical economics values things by seeing how much someone will pay for them. But this is where classical economics is wrong. What it fails to account for are all the 'externalities' - the services people regard as free goods: pollination services, flood protection, climate regulation, soil stabilization, carbon sequestration.

Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

The free lunch has still to be invented.

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.