Suchergebnisse

Abstract:Ronald Coase's work and its reception illustrate the significance – and the difficulty – of identifying problems and proposing solutions, which provides the theme of this paper. His theoretical innovation was not derived from economics, and seemed irrelevant to contemporary issues of economic theory and policy; only his much later perception of an apparently unrelated problem – the incoherent treatment of social cost as market failure – showed how the concept of transaction costs could illuminate two major areas of economics. The inadequate treatment by economists of the transaction costs of markets is linked to the neglect of processes, and especially the processes of organising the growth and use of knowledge – key concerns of Smith and Marshall. The curious relationship between Coase's explanation of firms and Austin Robinson's analysis of competitive industry leads to a reflection on the scarce resource of human cognition and the role (and fallibility) of institutions.

Style and Purpose "It's all in Marshall". There is more truth in that once‐familiar claim than there would be in a similar claim about any other economist; yet as Samuelson (1967, p. 25) rightly observed, what is in Marshall cannot be revealed by the reading of Marshall alone. What one sees is very largely a reflection of one's own viewpoint; often it is only after thinking about a specific issue that one realises that Marshall had thought about it too, and had set down his ideas in his usual unemphatic way, as if they were already common property. His manner is very different from that of Hicks, who always explains what he is doing and why; neither in the Principles (1961) nor in Industry and Trade (1919) does Marshall attempt to distinguish his own contributions, though frequently acknowledging those of others; and his clear views on how economists should proceed, though not suppressed, are not allowed to mark out a distinctively Marshallian programme. As a consequence, though he gained a great reputation, his ideas have had very little influence.