Transaction Costs Quotes

When you look at the government, when the government collects a buck, it's not free. They have to spend resources, the IRS, audits, all this sort of crap, to collect the dollar. I'm not assuming any Laffer curve effect here at all. There are just transactions costs of collecting that money.

I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.

"Free markets" is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. Most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. That is the source of all pollution problems, of the inequality problem. This reality ensures that the end of history will never come.

The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.

Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of 'organizing' production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.

English businesses would face massive transaction costs if Scotland, their second biggest export market, used a different currency.

The study of economic organization commonly proceeds as though market and administrative modes of organization were disjunct. Market organi­zation is the province of economists. Inter­nal organization is the concern of organization theory specialist. And never the twain shall meet.

Banks now want you to pay for face time, as more institutions charge fees for what was once the ritual for withdrawing and depositing your money: interacting with a teller.

Last year, Congress passed a law that directs the Federal Reserve to set limits on debit card swipe fees that are reasonable and proportional to the cost of processing those transactions. Like most Americans, I had no idea that swipe fees charged to American businesses are the highest in the world.

The more intermediaries there are, the more problems there are.

Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.

Vertical intergration is an organizational response to the contracting difficulties that attend intermediate product markets where trades that are supported by transaction-specific assets are exposed to hazard.

Promoting the interaction of orders remains one of the most difficult, but crucially important, challenges we face concerning our national market system.

Swipe fees have increased steadily since the introduction of debit cards 20 years ago, when there were no swipe fees at all. Merchants can't negotiate or control them. They've tried, but they have no leverage against the big banks and issuers. So they get ignored.

The economic analysis of law has had many good ideas. It's had one great idea -like, world-transforming idea, I think. And the idea is, when you're stuck, minimize the sum of the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

We don't think there is any money to be made in payments anymore. The entire business model of extracting a toll or having time delays around the movement of value is going away completely.

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

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.

Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

The most expensive way to do business is to do it deal by deal, each of which is highly contentious.

Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to whether the price happens to be set higher or lower than it would be otherwise. It represents a net lose to the economy as a whole to the extent that many transactions do not take place at all, because the mutually acceptable possibilities have been reduced.

Banks can't recoup the costs of serving customers who save in small amounts and transact frequently.