Ronald H. Coase: Marketing

Ronald H. Coase was British economist and author. Explore interesting quotes on marketing.
Ronald H. Coase: 38 quotes21 likes

“Markets are institutions that exist to facilitate exchange, that is, they exist in order to reduce the cost of carrying out exchange transactions. In an economic theory which assumes that transaction costs are nonexistent. markets have no function to perform, and it seems perfectly reasonable to develop the theory of exchange by an elaborate analysis of individuals exchanging nuts for apples on the edge of the forest or some similar fanciful example. This analysis certainly shows why there is a gain from trade, but it fails to deal with the factors which determine how much trade there is or what goods are traded.”

Ronald H. Coase

1960s-1980s, "The Firm, the Market, and the Law" (1988)

“Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production. It is clear that these are alternative methods of coordinating production. Yet, having regard to the fact that, if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organization at all might we ask, why is there any organization?”

Ronald H. Coase

Source: 1930s-1950s, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), p. 388

“What is studied is a system which lives in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result “blackboard economics.” The firm and the market appear by name but they lack any substance. The firm in mainstream economic theory has often been described as a “black box.””

Ronald H. Coase

And so it is.
1990s and later, "The Institutional Structure of Production" (1992)

“In mainstream economic theory, the firm and the market are, for the most part, assumed to exist and are not themselves the subject of investigation. One result has been that the crucial role of the law in determining the activities carried out by the firm and in the market has been largely ignored.”

Ronald H. Coase

1960s-1980s, "The Firm, the Market, and the Law" (1988)

“Why… are there any market transactions at all? Why not all production carried on by one big firm?… First, as a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organizing additional transactions within the firm may rise… Second, it may be that as the transactions which are organized increase, the entrepreneur fails to place the factors of production in the uses where their value is greatest, that is, fails to make the best use of the factors of production… Finally, the supply price of one or more of the factors of production may rise, because the "other advantages" of a small firm are greater than those of a large firm.”

Ronald H. Coase

Source: 1930s-1950s, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), p. 394-5

“The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market. This determines what the firm buys, produces, and sells. As the concept of transaction costs is not usually used by economists, it is not surprising that an approach which incorporates it will find some difficulty in getting itself accepted. We can best understand this attitude if we consider not the firm but the market.”

Ronald H. Coase

1960s-1980s, "The Firm, the Market, and the Law" (1988)