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...

Under caveat emptor, buyers effect their measurements prior to exchange. Long-term relations and contracts allow buyers to measure commodities at consumption. Buyers use subjective measurements in long-term relations. Contractual guarantees shift enforcement to the state, but require objective,...

In recent years a debate has raged about the accuracy of the cost-of-living index. A major bone of contention regards capturing the changes in the quality of goods. Were it easy to measure quality, disputes about the magnitude of the change would have not arisen. The difficulty in pinpointing...