icle and
puts a price on the several utilities which compose it. The market
does this in exactly the same way in which it would appraise a bundle
of dissimilar articles which had to be sold separately, and we will
therefore trace the operation by which a package containing the
commodities A, B, C, and D would get its value in an actual market.

_How the Normal Price of a Single Good in a Bundle of Unlike Goods
would be Fixed._--Let us see how a bundle made up of commodities A, B,
C, and D would get its value in the market. We will suppose that these
articles are here named in the order of their importance, and that A
has the highest utility, since it renders the most important service,
and that D has the least. It may be that the article A has a utility
rated at one hundred dollars in a particular man's esteem. He would
give one hundred dollars for it rather than do without it altogether.
The service, then, that one article of this kind can render is
expressed by the sum one hundred dollars. Article B taken separately
may be worth fifty dollars, since it may render such services that the
man would give fifty dollars rather than be without it. A third
article, C, may in the same way be valued at twenty dollars and a
fourth at ten. Now, if a man has to buy the whole bundle, must he pay
one hundred dollars plus fifty plus twenty plus ten, or one hundred
and eighty for the whole? This does not by any means follow. The first
article may be sold separately at a price far below one hundred
dollars. There may be so large a supply of it that, in order to find a
market for it all, the makers must take ten dollars for it. This fixes
the market price of that amount of this commodity at ten dollars. If
we now glance beyond the question of the "market price" of the goods
and consider their more permanent or "normal price," the inquiry
requires us to do more than ascertain why a definite quantity of the
goods offered at a certain time sells for a certain amount. An appeal
to the law of final utility answers that question. To know, however,
why the permanent price is what it is, we have to know what fixes the
permanent supply, and we discover that the cost of making the goods is
here a dominant influence. For the present we assume that this cost
does not change, since such changes are a subject for the dynamic
studies which will come later. The present fact is that production has
been carried to such a point that no more of these goods