Harold Demsetz Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

Modern analysis has yet to describe inefficiency in a world where indivisibilities are present and knowledge is costly to produce.

Harold Demsetz
The legal substructure is private; the use of payments to influence the behavior of others is neither prohibited nor frowned upon. But the ' frictions" that perfect decentralization assumes away, must be lived with in laissez-faire.

Harold Demsetz
Business firms, in which controlled cooperation takes place, are the first important implication of costly transactions. The laissez-faire filtering process, using the profit test, selects some of these business organizations for survival and rejects others.

Harold Demsetz
Property rights develop to internalize externalities when the gains of internalization become larger than the cost of internalization. Increased internalization, in the main, results from changes in economic values, changes which stem from the development of new technology and the opening of new markets, changes to which old property rights are poorly attuned [G]iven a community's tastes... [for private versus state ownership], the emergence of new private or state-owned property rights will be in response to changes in technology and relative prices.

Harold Demsetz
The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing "imperfect" institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.

Harold Demsetz
A relevant notion of efficiency must refer to scarcity and people as they are, not as they could be.

Harold Demsetz