and are prepared to pay for this (but generally people are paid more to direct others); if purchasers prefer goods produced by firms. Instead, for Coase the main reason to establish a firm is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism. These include discovering relevant prices (which can be reduced but not eliminated by purchasing this information through specialists), as well as the costs of negotiating and writing enforceable contracts for each transaction (which can be large if there is uncertainty). Moreover, contracts in an uncertain world will necessarily be incomplete and have to be frequently re-negotiated. The costs of haggling about the division of surplus, particularly if there is asymmetric information and asset specificity, may be considerable. If a firm operated internally under the market system, many contracts would be required (for instance, even for procuring a pen or delivering a presentation). In contrast, a real firm has very few (though much more complex) contracts, such as defining a manager's power of direction over employees, in exchange for which the employee is paid. These kinds of contracts are drawn up in situations of uncertainty, in particular for relationships that last over long periods of time. Such a situation runs counter to neo-classical economic theory. The neo-classical market is instantaneous, forbidding the development of extended agent-principal (employee-manager) relationships, planning, and of trust. Coase concludes that “a firm is likely therefore to emerge in those cases where a very short-term contract would be unsatisfactory”, and that “it seems improbable that a firm would emerge without the existence of uncertainty”. He notes that government measures relating to the market (sales taxes, rationing, price controls) tend to increase the size of firms, since firms internally would not be subject to such transaction costs. Thus, Coase defines the firm as "the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on the entrepreneur." We can therefore think of a firm as getting larger or smaller based on whether the entrepreneur organises more or fewer transactions. The question then arises of what determines the size of the firm; why does the entrepreneur organise the transactions he does, why no more or less? Since the reason for the firm's being is to have lower costs than the market, the upper limit on the firm's size is set by costs rising to the point where internalising an