In economics, a price system is any economic system that affects its distribution of goods and services with prices and employing any form of money. Except for possible remote and primitive communities, all modern societies use price systems to allocate resources. However, price systems are not used exclusively for all resource allocation decisions.[1]
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A price system may be either a fixed price system where prices are set by a dictatorial government or it may be a free price system where prices are left to float freely as determined by unregulated supply and demand. Or it may be a combination of both with a mixed price system.
Fundamentally, price systems have been around as long as there has been trade or money.
The institutional economist Thorstein Veblen wrote a tract which was seminal in development of the term as discussed in this article: The Engineers and the Price System.[2][3] Its chapter VI, A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians discusses the possibility of socialist revolution in the United States comparable to that then occurring in Russia (the Soviets had not yet at that time become a state (USSR formed in 1922)).
From its beginnings, the price system has evolved into the system of global capitalism that is present in the early 21st century.[4] The Soviet Union and other communist nations with a centralized planned economy were controlled price systems. Whether the ruble or the dollar is used in the economic system, the criterion of a price system is the use of money as an arbiter and usual final arbiter of whether a thing is done or not. In other words, few things are done without consideration for the costs and the potential making of a profit in a price system.
Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek argued that a free price system allowed economic coordination via the price signals that changing prices sent, which is regarded as one of his most significant and influential contributions to economics.[5]
From "The Use of Knowledge in Society"...'The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coördinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type'...Friedrich A. Hayek[6]