Читать книгу Market Theory and the Price System - Israel M. Kirzner - Страница 30

Chapter 2 surveys the overall operation of a market system.

A market system is characterized by a framework of law that broadly recognizes individual freedom, responsibility, and private property rights. Market theory assumes the use of a medium of exchange.

In a market system individuals may fill the roles of consumer, resource owner, and/or entrepreneur. The chains of cause and effect that are expressed through market forces operate through the typical structural interdependence existing between the decisions made by consumers, resource owners, and entrepreneurs. Vertical relationships between market decisions exist when goods and services are bought for later sale; for example, when resources are bought by entrepreneurs from resource owners to be used in production and sold in the form of the product to consumers. Horizontal relationships exist, for example, when two different products require the use of the same resource in their production; or where a product may be produced with either of two resources that are substitutes for one another.

A market is in equilibrium when all decisions dovetail with each other. Disequilibrium exists when some decisions cannot be executed because they have been planned on the basis of mistaken assumptions concerning the decisions of others. The market process consists in the adjustments that are enforced upon individual decisions by the disappointments experienced in a disequilibrium market. The economic theorist may confine his attention to a limited series of adjustments that may be wrought out within the market system. He will recognize that the situation where all these limited series of adjustments have fully worked themselves out is one of only partial equilibrium. For the entire market system to be in equilibrium—that is, for a general equilibrium to prevail—each of the separate sectors of the market must be in harmony with each of the others. Market theory recognizes the existence of chains of cause and effect between all the market sectors as well as within each of them. The general market process comprises all the adjustments enforced upon the market activities of resource owners, consumers, and entrepreneurs throughout the system by an initial failure of all their decisions to dovetail perfectly with each other.