The law of property determines who owns something, but the market determines how it will be used.
From Ronald Coase
The pollution problem is always seen as someone who was doing something bad that has to be stopped. To me, pollution is doing something bad and good. People don't pollute because they like polluting. They do it because it's a cheaper way of producing something else.
I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.
I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.
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.
People have used my views for purposes which are very different from mine.
Roughly speaking, when you are dealing with business firms operating in a competitive system, you can assume that they're going to act rationally. Why? Because someone in a firm who buys things at $10 and sells them for $8.00 isn't going to last very long in that firm.
You get more irrationality within the family and in consumer behavior than you get, say, in the behavior of firms in their purchases.
I've been wrong so often, I don't find it extraordinary at all.
You should not forget that without all the work in law and economics, a great part of which has been supported by the John M. Olin Foundation, it is doubtful whether the importance of my work would have been recognized.
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