Thirty years ago, "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960) was published. It transformed the field of industrial organization and greatly expanded its scope. The authors briefly survey the state of the field before 1960 and then show some of the ways by which Ronald Coase's paper changed economic...

Increased standardization was a by-product of technical innovations during the Industrial Revolution. An unfortunate side effect of standardization was enhanced opportunities for theft and embezzlement. Two significant modern institutions radically evolved during the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth...