In this essay (which forms part of a collection celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Problem of Social Cost”) I focus on a particular characteristic of Ronald Coase's work, as exhibited in “The Problem of Social Cost”: his ability to force upon his audience a...

Various reformulations of the Coase theorem have developed normative corollaries on the choice of optimal remedies in the presence of positive transaction costs. In this article, we consider the extent to which these propositions are affected by the presence of asymmetric transaction costs, and...