Coase su “Durability and Monopoly” (Una questione di priorità e non solo)

This paper addresses certain issues of priority about the monopoly of durable goods. It argues that Maffeo Pantaleoni was the first scholar to address the topic in few pages of the unpublished notes of his lectures held in Naples in the academic year 1896‐ 1897. Pantaleoni’s thesis is an exhaustive and convincing one: the monopolist has the possibility and convenience to sell the whole stock of durable goods he owns by applying a policy of price discrimination. The fact that Pantaleoni’s notes are unpublished and unknown contributes to explain why no paternity has been recognised to him and conversely has been attributed unanimously to Ronald Coase, who wrote on the topic some eighty years later, in 1972, in a paper published by the Journal of Law and Economics (Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 143-149).It is worth noticing that Coase, similarly to Pantaleoni, recognises that the monopoly of durable goods sells the entire stock it owns. Nevertheless, on the other hand, he also denies that price discrimination can be pursued, and the price would rather be unique and equal to the one that perfect competition would produce. This does not seem a good reason to attribute the merit of paternity to Coase. As argued by this paper, Coase’s argument suffers of important flaws and, from certain points of view, is also contradictory. Moreover, in spite of the good it contains, his argument came after many decades since Pantaleoni understood the specificity of the question, addressed it convincingly, and wrote on it.