Harold Demsetz

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

"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 e…"

"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…"

"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 di…"

"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 the…"

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