The marginalist revolution and the development of neoclassical price theory, while producing a theory of the firm which was lacking in the earlier classical analysis, nonetheless failed to provide a full rationale for the firm's role in the economic system. Indeed, in its single-minded emphasis on choice in factor substitution, it reduced the firm, conceptually and analytically, to a set or series of actual or potential exchange relationships not unlike those of the market itself. Its incorporation of the firm fully into the market nexus, thereby perhaps obscuring some of the fundamental differences between these two institutions, was undoubtedly one of the principal reasons why the neoclassical paradigm left unasked the fundamental questions not raised until Coase's pathbreaking analysis appeared several decades later.