Coase

The problem of the choice of environmental policy instruments has been an issue since Pigou [2] analyzed the need for state intervention when private costs diverge from social costs and suggested that the solution would be to internalize the externalities through taxation.1 Coase [4] criticized the proposed state intervention and affirmed that there is no reason to suppose that governmental regulation is called for simply because the problem is not very well handled by the market or the firm. 

Coase, Ronald H. 1960. The Problemof Social Cost. Jourwa/of Laa and Economics 3 1 44. 

COASE, R. H. (1990). The flrm, the market, and the law. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. New York HarpeiColUns. 

Tor use in the laboratory, hydrate of potassa, prepared as above, is treated with rectified spirit of wine in a stoppered bottle. The solution is allowed to deposit, decanted and evaporated in a silver dish, until fumes coase to be evolved, adding from time to time during the evaporation some water to prevent blacken-... 

This issue was succinctly encapsulated in the statement Bibby attributes to Ronald Coase, viz If you torture the data enough they will eventually confess . The problem can be seen quantitatively in Table 7.13. If 14 or more separate independent analyses are carried out, it is more likely than not that at least one statistically significant difference will be found just as a result of the play of chance, even if there are no real differences in truth. The problem of multiple analyses also arises when several different studies have been carried out, and a particular difficulty is that authors and journals editors may prefer positive findings (statistically significant) to negative ones, creating a possible bias in the literature towards positive studies. 

Thousands of activities arc performed and coordinated within a company, and every company is by nature in some way involved in supply chain relationships with other companies (Bowersox 1997b Stigler 1951 Coase 1937). When two companies build a relationship, certain of their intemtil activities will be linked and managed between the two companies (Hakansson and Snehota 1995). Since both companies have linked some internal activities with other members of their supply cheiin, a link between two companies is thus a link in what might be conceived as a supply cheiin network. For example, the internal activities of a manufacturer are linked with and can affect the interned activities of a distributor, which in turn are linked with and can have an effect on the interned activities of a retailer. Ultimately, the internal activities of the retailer are linked with and can affect the activities of the end customer. 

A useful way to think about this problem is in terms of the so-called Coase Theorem (or more accurately, the Coase Conjecture), which contends that in a wide variety of situations, where an individual does not initially own a good and must pay to acquire it or where he or she... 

This example also exposes what may ultimately come to be seen as the most important flaw in the Coase Theorem if companies are given the right to do harm they will threaten it whenever they can, in order to accumulate more... 

Bera T. K. and Nagaraju J., A simple instrumentation calibration technique for electrical impedance tomography (EIT) using a 16-electrode phantom. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE 2009), Bangalore, India, August 22-25,2009, pp. 347-352, doi 10.1109/COASE.2009.5234117,2009. 

Madhok, A., 2002. Reassessing the fundamentals and beyond Ronald Coase the transaction cost and resource-based theories of the firm and the institutional structure of production. Strategic Management Journal 23,... 

In a sense. New Institutional Economics can be considered as an extension of the standard model that takes explicitly into account the power issue. The famous Robertson s definition of firms as islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconscious cooperation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk , was used by Coase (1937) to launch the question of how is that in capitahst economies firms (and thus power) do substitute the market as a means to allocate resources (this issue has been recently addressed by Rajan and Zingales, 1998). 

Coase, R., 1937. The Nature of the Firm. Economica 4, 386-405 Coleman, J.S., 1990. Foundations of social theory. Harvard University Press. 

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