Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Yo, I have posted to SSRN a preprint of my new paper “Adam Smith and the ‘Absurd Prescriptions’ of Doctors“, which surveys Smith’s documented encounters with the doctors and medical treatments of his day. (Full disclosure: I did not use … Continue reading →

To recap my series of blog posts on Ronald Coase, I have been tracing the intellectual origins of what I like to call “Coase’s axiom”: the counter-intuitive idea that harms are a reciprocal problem. Did his axiom originate with with … Continue reading →

In my previous post, we saw Frank Knight’s critique of A. C. Pigou’s economic analysis of traffic congestion. For Pigou, road congestion is a tragedy of the commons or market failure that requires active government intervention: the imposition of a … Continue reading →

Was it the University of Cambridge economist A. C. Pigou (pictured below) who unwittingly inspired Ronald Coase’s notion of reciprocal harms? We spent most of last week tracing the origins of Ronald Coase’s axiom that harms are a reciprocal problem, … Continue reading →

Thus far this past week, we have attempted to trace the intellectual origins of Ronald Coase’s counter-intuitive idea of reciprocal harms to his undergraduate years at the London School of Economics (see here and here), but as I asked at … Continue reading →

In my previous two posts (see here and here), we attempted to trace the intellectual origins of Ronald Coase’s reciprocal-harm axiom to Wesley Hohfeld’s theory of legal relations and to the “LSE tradition in cost theory” developed by Lionel Robbins … Continue reading →

Picking up where we last left off, I had identified another possible source of Ronald Coase’s counter-intuitive reciprocal-harm model at the end of my previous post: what economists and historians of economic thought call the “LSE tradition in cost theory,” … Continue reading →

The first time Ronald Coase uses the word “reciprocal” to describe the problem of harmful effects is in his 1959 FCC paper (Coase 1959), but this observation begs the question, what is the source of Coase’s reciprocal-harm model? Did Coase … Continue reading →

I have long been fascinated by the English economist Ronald Coase’s insight that harms are always a “reciprocal” or jointly-caused problem–so much so that I wrote a paper at the end of last year titled “Coase’s fable” in which I … Continue reading →