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Harold Demsetz Quotes

1930–2019 United States

Harold Demsetz (May 31, 1930 – January 4, 2019) was an American economist, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Demsetz belonged to the Chicago school of economics, and was one of the pioneers of New Institutional Economics.

United States
Academics
Economists

Random Harold Demsetz quote

4 quotes

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

Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint (1969)

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

Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint (1969)

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.

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Harold Demsetz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.