Ronald Coase’s landmark 1937 article, ‘‘The Nature of the Firm,’’ framed the study of organizational economics for decades. Coase asked three fundamental questions: Why do firms exist? What determines their boundaries? How should firms be organized internally? To answer the first question, Coase famously appealed to ‘‘the costs of using the price mechanism,’’ what we now call transaction costs ...

Debt-for-nature swaps have emerged as one method for debt burdened nations to retire their foreign debt through international markets. In a typical debt-for-nature swap, conservation groups buy some portion of a nation's debt, usually in secondary markets at discounted prices, in return for long-term commitments from the country to preserve domestic ecological zones. The first debt-for-nature s...

Gene Dr1184 from Deinococcus radiodurans codes for a Nudix enzyme (DR-CoAse) that hydrolyzes the pyrophosphate moiety of coenzyme A (CoA). Nudix enzymes with the same specificity have been found in yeast, humans, and mice. The three-dimensional structure of DR-CoAse, the first of a Nudix hydrolase with this specificity, reveals that this enzyme contains, in addition to the fold observed in othe...

This paper analyzes an explicit protocol of contract negotiation between a principal who has all the bargaining power and an agent who holds some private information about his preferences. It extends the framework of the Coase conjecture to situations in which the seller and the buyer must determine the quantity or the quality of the good being sold. The results also provide a foundation for re...

Coase raised fundamental questions on the firm nature and market solution for social conflicts. However, confusion was around the symmetric intonation of transaction costs, the ill-formulated Coase Theorem, and the false analogy in physics. Fundamental issues in the transaction costs approach can be elaborated by the symmetry assumption in equilibrium economics and symmetry breaking in evolutio...

We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC ) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs t...

The Coase Theorem has a central place in the theory of environmental economics and regulation. Its applicability for solving real-world externality problems remains debated. We first this seminal contribution its historical context. then survey experimental literature that tested importance many, often tacit assumptions Theorem. discuss selection applications to actual problems, distinguishing ...