Ronald Coase

Theory of the Firm, transaction costs

Ronald Coase (1910–2013) was a British economist and long-serving professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991 for two landmark ideas: that firms exist to minimise transaction costs ("The Nature of the Firm", 1937) and that, given clear property rights and low transaction costs, private bargaining resolves externalities efficiently — the basis of the Coase theorem.