Acknowledging Coase's contribution, Demsetz nevertheless abstracts from him, more sharply defining the firm in terms of the formation and performance of multiple "contracts," which secure on the firm's behalf agents of a knowledge base (esp. p. 25) and productive expertise, which in turn are coordinated to the firm's benefit by management. Now such coordination cannot take place in a vacuum, although much business/corporate commentary tends to imply that the only environment relevant to corporate behavior is that of the market. This is where the articles by Carman and Harris become relevant, for they make the point that the market does not behave at the convenience of the firm but that firms attempt to manipulate the market to their advantage and more, to promote the fiction that such manipulation is in truth the operation of perfectly functioning markets guided by an invisible hand of natural regulation and competition. As a matter of fact, however, government intervention in the form of regulation is a consequence of the imperfection of market behavior and is meant, on the whole, to foster a level playing field (or at any rate to hinder bullying tactics of powerful corporate players), in the service of social value. In their two articles, Carman and Harris describe the way in which markets "fail," or more exactly fail to behave perfectly (e.g., via oligopoly, monopoly, fragmented competition), and then categorize various governmental responses to such failures, (e.g., moral suasion, price controls, minimum standards, legislation). Ideally, the regulatory response is in line with the character of market imperfection, but they observe the difficulty of appropriately matching regulation with "a given market failure" (p. 59), suggesting as well that the tension between categories of market failure and categories of regulation is always in flux, always subject to changing real-world experience. Indeed, regulation, like markets, can fail a...