Different kinds of economies do this differently.
We now need to look more closely at the process by which prices allocate scarce resources that have alternative uses.
The situation where the consumers want product A and don’t want product B is the simplest example
of how prices lead to efficiency in the use of scarce resources.
But prices are equally important in more common and more complex situations, where consumers want both A and B, as well as many other things, some of which require the same ingredients in their production.
What this all means as a general principle is that the price which one producer is willing to pay for any given ingredient becomes the price that other producers are forced to pay for that same ingredient.
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