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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Coase Theorem And Arthur Cecil Pigou, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Dec 2008

The Coase Theorem And Arthur Cecil Pigou, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In "The Problem of Social Cost" Ronald Coase was highly critical of the work of Cambridge University Economics Professor Arthur Cecil Pigou, presenting him as a radical government interventionist. In later work Coase's critique of Pigou became even more strident. In fact, however, Pigou's Economics of Welfare created the basic model and many of the tools that Coase's later work employed. Much of what we today characterize as the "Coase Theorem," including the relevance of transaction costs, externalities, and bilateral monopoly, was either stated or anticipated in Pigou's work. Further, Coase's extreme faith in private bargaining led him to fail …


The Politics Of The Coase Theorem And Its Relationship To Modern Legal Thought, Donald H. Gjerdingen Jan 1986

The Politics Of The Coase Theorem And Its Relationship To Modern Legal Thought, Donald H. Gjerdingen

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.


The Coase Theorem And The Psychology Of Common-Law Thought, Donald H. Gjerdingen Jan 1983

The Coase Theorem And The Psychology Of Common-Law Thought, Donald H. Gjerdingen

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Coase Theorem is a simple proposition-in the absence of transaction costs, a Pareto optimal result will occur regardless of the initial placement of legal liability. Despite this apparent simplicity, however, Coase's economic parable has provoked intense debate in the legal community. Why does the theorem grate on the hardened intuitions of so many lawyers? The thesis of this Article is that a connection exists between the adoption or rejection of a given school of legal thought and the use of certain psychological constructs. Specifically, this Article argues that the constructs underlying the Coase Theorem are incompatible with those underlying …