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The Coasean Analysis Of Harmful Interactions: Some Conceptual Difficulties, Satish K. Jain

Satish K. Jain

This paper is concerned with two distinct issues flowing from Coase's analysis of harmful interactions and of how courts deal with them. The first issue relates to the domain of validity of the Coase Theorem. It is argued in the paper that if non-pecuniary considerations are brought into the analysis then it can no longer be claimed that the outcome will be efficient regardless of liability assignments. In other words, it is contended in the paper that the validity of the Coase Theorem is crucially dependent on neglect of non-pecuniary considerations from the analysis. From this it follows that if …