The price of a commodity is a definite and fairly stable quantity, _e. g._, the price of an oil-stove is $4.50. Is it possible that this definite price can be said to be determined by the utility of oil-stoves to consumers? Consumers cannot reduce their estimates of the utility of articles directly to figures. But, nevertheless, a consumer can determine upon a sum of money whose general purchasing power he considers approximately equivalent to the value of an oil-stove to him. The value of the oil-stove is a wavering quantity, but having struck a money estimate on the basis of that value, taking it for what it is at the instant of the decision, this money sum is a definite something that will be carried in mind as such though the value is indefinite and wavering. Given these definite “price equivalents” the definite market price is a resultant from them. The market price of a good is a sort of social institution and has the momentum or stability of such an institution. Being once determined, it will not waver as do the numberless individual estimates of “esteem value” upon which it is founded. 5. If a commodity fetching a definite and exact price, as for instance an oil-stove selling for $4.50, is produced under competitive conditions, the apparent and proximate reason why the article has this particular price is because it costs its manufacturer about this sum of money to produce it. Putting aside the complications due to the fact that competition frequently takes place between firms producing at different costs, the commonest law of exchange value, stated in the usual language, is that price is “determined by” entrepreneur’s cost of production. Whether entrepreneur’s cost is reckoned in terms of wages, interest, and rent; wages and interest alone; or in terms merely of the prices of all the production goods “entering into” the product, the law of entrepreneur’s cost, as stated above, reduces itself to the proposition that the exchange value of production goods “determines” the exchange value of products. For all forms of calculating entrepreneur’s costs are based on the simple, practical, or first method of reckoning costs, as the prices of labor, raw material, machinery, power, _etc._[226]