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Analysis Of Ronald Harry Coase 's ' The Marginal Cost Controversy '

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Ronald Harry Coase, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. Dr. Couse was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991 for his work in the field of the Theory of Market Institutions contributing to the line between economics, law and organization. The foundations of Couse’s beliefs were that serious economists should not study theoretical markets and instead should concentrate all their efforts on real world markets. Dr. Coase is best known for two well-established articles "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960). The book itself if a collection of these two critically acclaimed articles and three additional articles; “The Marginal Cost Controversy” (1946), “Industrial …show more content…

Coase’s main points brought together in his introduction and additional notes, but drawn from his scholarly articles begin with the concept that the choice between how a firm is organized and how the market is organized is varied and will continue to be varied, but not because of changes in technology. Instead, both individual firms and the market as a whole are organized so that each attempts to minimize or economize inherent transaction costs. Coase goes on to explain that the study of these tangible and material transaction costs is actually a study of opportunity cost. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s less media attention grabbing partner, explains opportunity costs very succinctly and points a finger in the eye of economic professors; “Everything is based on opportunity costs. Academia has done a terrible disservice: they teach in one sentence in first-year economics about opportunity costs, but that’s it. In life, if opportunity A is better than B, and you have only one opportunity, you do A. ” This is Coase’s point, that firms and the market deal with the information at hand and make decisions in a world of scarce resources. Given a choice between A and B, then the one with the maximized value will be logically chosen every time. If in the real world study of a firm or market that the logical choice wasn’t chosen, then the economist has not values all the tangible benefits and costs that were weighed by decision makers,

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