The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing
Oscar Wilde
I don’t think this is the first time I’m putting up this quote. But I’m just wondering today. What are prices for? Why are there prices for things? What does a price mean? If anything at all?
Prices are signals from the perspective of economics. The level that clears the market; where demand matches supply. A high price or low price doesn’t really mean much. It’s unclear if the prices reflects costs of production because there can be market power driving margins. Besides, when storage costs are expensive, a producer might be keen to sell excess supply at lower than production costs.
But prices drives behaviours; they create some kind of incentive to produce, to trade, to buy, and sell. It is some kind of benchmark against which we evaluate our preferences. Because we’d try to figure out if something was ‘worth the price’. And so the market moves; and people try to justify prices with attributes, features, emotional storytelling. And prices in turn drives those stories, emotional expression and comparisons.