In ordinary usage, price is the quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services.
In modern economies, prices are generally expressed in units of some form of currency. (For commodities, they are expressed as currency per unit weight of the commodity, e.g. euros per kilogram.) Although prices could be quoted as quantities of other goods or services this sort of barter exchange is rarely seen. Prices are sometimes quoted in terms of vouchers such as trading stamps and air miles. In some circumstances, cigarettes have been used as currency, for example in prisons, in times of hyperinflation, and in some places during World War 2. In the black economy, barter is also relatively common.
In many financial transactions, it is customary to quote prices in other ways. The most obvious example is in pricing a loan, when the cost will be expressed as the percentage rate of interest. The total amount of interest payable depends upon the loan amount and the period of the loan. Other examples can be found in pricing financial derivatives and other financial assets. For instance the price of inflation-linked government securities in several countries is quoted as the actual price divided by a factor representing inflation since the security was issued.
Price sometimes refers to the quantity of payment requested by a seller of goods or services, rather than the eventual payment amount. This requested amount is often called the asking price or selling price, while the actual payment may be called the transaction price or traded price. Likewise, the bid price or buying price is the quantity of payment offered by a buyer of goods or services, although this meaning is more common in asset or financial markets than in consumer markets.
Economists sometimes define price more generally as the ratio of the quantities of goods that are exchanged for each other.
Read more about Price: Price Theory, Price and Value, Austrian School Theory, Price As Productive Human Labour Time, Confusion Between Prices and Costs of Production, Price Point
Other articles related to "price, prices":
... Price developed his ideas with his close neighbour Richard Payne Knight, whose poem 'The Landscape' was published the same year as Price's Essay delineating his theories on "T ... Well before Price's Essay or Knight's poem, however, the term 'pictoresque' was used in early 18th century France to refer to a property of being 'in the style of a painter ... from that of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur." For Price, the Picturesque was more specifically defined as being located between the Beautiful and the Sublime ...
... Later scholars argued that Marx's formulas for competitive prices were mistaken ... of return over constant capital valued at its price, not its Marxian value, contrary to what is done in Table 2 above ... Secondly, competitive prices result from the sum of costs valued at the prices of things, not as amounts of embodied labour ...
... Irving Lanouette Price (September 21, 1884 – November 23, 1976) was a U.S ... He was the co-founder and co-eponym of Fisher-Price Toys in 1930 ... children's book illustrator and artist Margaret Evans Price (1888-1973) ...
... There were 92 households out of which 35.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 67.4% were married couples living together, 5.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 20.7% were non-families. 16.3% of all households were made up of individuals and 9.8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older ...
... Prior to Christmas 2010 Waitrose launched a campaign matching Tesco's price on 1000 branded products ... items would be no more expensive than shopping in Tesco by directly matching the price with that of its rival ... In 2012 this was updated to include a price match promise on all branded goods with Tesco ...
Famous quotes containing the word price:
“And is the price for your acceptance for me to conform? To be as you would want me to be?... You must accept me as I am. Do not question.... If my behavior seems different perhaps it is because it serves a higher purpose than to find acceptance in this dull and useless world.”
—Pat Fielder, and Paul Landres. Dracula (Francis Lederer)
“Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)