poorer purchasers. It appears, then, that a seventy-five dollar coat
is a bundle of distinct elements, or utilities, each of which has its
separate cost and is sold at that cost price to a particular marginal
class of purchasers. Each element is valued exactly as if it were in
itself a complete article tied in this case to others, but also
offered separately in the market. Persons of one class are final
purchasers of the first utility when it is offered at its cost, six
dollars. Another class, in a like manner, helps to set the price of
the second utility at fourteen, and still other classes figure in the
adjustment of the prices of the third and fourth utilities. These cost
the manufacturers twenty dollars and thirty-five dollars respectively,
and competition insures the making of enough of them to catch the
patronage of those who will pay just these amounts. Members of one
class act as marginal purchasers in price making in the case of one
utility only. The concurrent action of all of them results in setting
the price of the best coat at eighty dollars. It is a very practical
fact that the rates at which all fine articles sell in the market are
fixed in this way. Such articles contain utilities unlike each other.
They have power to render services of varying degrees of importance,
and each of the several services gets its normal valuation when
producers make enough to supply the want of a particular group of
persons to whom it is a marginal service and who are willing to pay
only what it costs. They would go without that one service if they had
to pay more for it.

_This Method of Valuation Applicable to All Commodities of High
Grade._--Illustrations of this principle might be multiplied
indefinitely. A fine watch tells the time of day, but something that
would do that could be had for a dollar, and that is all that this
fundamental element in the fine watch sells for. It takes a series of
purchasers bidding on the higher utilities of the fine watch to make
it sell for five hundred dollars. The man who buys such a watch would
give, perhaps, ten thousand for it rather than be without a watch
altogether, but he is saved from the necessity of doing so by the fact
that poorer customers have done the appraising in the case of all the
more fundamental qualities which the watch possesses. So long as an
Ingersoll "dollar watch" will tell the time of day, no one will pay
more than a dollar for exactly that same service render