Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Coase theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and transaction costs are sufficiently low, bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of how property rights are initially assigned. The theorem is attributed to Ronald Coase's 1960 article "The Problem of Social Cost," and the label was given by George Stigler.
In "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), Coase argued that firms exist because using markets involves transaction costs beyond the price of goods - including search costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement costs. Firms internalise production to avoid these costs, but face natural limits as overhead and managerial mistakes rise with size.
Ronald Coase received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
Coase spent most of his career at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He held the title of Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics there and co-edited the Journal of Law and Economics with Aaron Director.
The Coase conjecture is an informal argument that durable goods monopolists lack market power because they cannot credibly commit to not lowering their prices in future periods.
Ronald Coase's last book was "How China Became Capitalist," published in 2012 and co-authored with Ning Wang. Coase was working on the book about the rise of the Chinese and Vietnamese economies as he approached his hundredth birthday.