Ronald Coase

economist, known for his Theory Of The Firm and other things

Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The nature of the firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of Transaction Cost-s to explain the size of firms, and "The problem of social cost" (1960), which suggests that well defined Property Rights could overcome the problems of Externality-s. (These are dates of first publication.) http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase

http://coase.org/

Apr'2008: Venkatesh Rao on the need for a Coase for the Network Economy: In everything I’ve read, this (Coase's work) is the only coherent conjecture I’ve seen about the nature of the economic impact of the Internet. And that’s why we need Neo. A modern-day intellectual descendant of Coase who makes transaction-cost economics as sexy as Levitt has made behavioral economics. There is a LOT of work to be done. We need good models of how firms shrink and grow. We need models of the impact of on-demand labor, sourced from online marketplaces like E Lance and ODesk, on the cost structure of large enterprises. We need a fundamental theory of crowdsourcing. We need Ricardo’s comparative advantage ideas folded into a broader model of the costs of doing work in various organizational structures.