Is There Really a Price for Anything?

Connecting the dots

By Rujjwal. A thought-provoking read, about 5 minutes.Published on 10/11/2026

My daughter's scribble is worth a million dollars. At least, that's what I'd say. If I put it up for sale, though, no one would pay me a dollar for it. So is it worthless, worth a million, or somewhere in between? That question is what I want to dissect here: what a price is, and who decides it.

Two kinds of value

I think a price has two parts, which I'll call cost value and extrinsic value.

Cost value is the physical cost of the good itself: the paper, the ink, and, if you want to count it, rent for my daughter's time. Extrinsic value lies in the eye of the beholder. To me, her scribble is worth a million dollars or more, and I might not sell it for any amount, because it carries priceless emotion. The catch is that a price only exists when a trade happens, and a trade needs both a buyer and a seller to agree, usually on the buyer's terms. What buyers decide depends on things we already know: demand, competition, usability, and adoption.

Consider a pen that writes normally and costs me $1 to make. I label it $100, but plenty of better pens sell for $1.50. Why would anyone buy mine? Cost sets a floor for me as the seller. It doesn't set the price. The price is where what a buyer will pay meets what I'm willing to accept, and my $100 will never get there. That $100 is a listed price, and it will never become an executed one.

That gap between listed and executed prices is the thread I want to follow through the rest of this piece.

When expectations set the price

Expectations move prices as well, not just cost, demand, and competition. I remember toilet paper vanishing from shelves during COVID and being listed like gold on eBay. The cost to produce it hadn't changed. People feared future scarcity, and those fears drove prices up.

Then there are NFTs. Do you remember the craze? In August 2021, Logan Paul paid 188 ETH, roughly $635,000, for a cartoon avatar from the 0N1 Force collection. A year later he admitted it was worth essentially nothing, and recent estimates put it at about $155. The image itself can be copied by anyone for free, so what he bought was belief. When NFTs first appeared, people saw them as the future of art and collecting, a digital asset like Bitcoin. Celebrities hyped them, mass euphoria followed, and prices inflated. The facade fell once the COVID lockdowns and the insanity faded.

Bitcoin: a price made of belief

Bitcoin is a different and more interesting case. Warren Buffett famously criticized it. It has no intrinsic value in the traditional sense: it isn't a good or a commodity, it produces no cash flow, and unlike gold you can't even use it for decoration. Yet its first recorded trades in 2010 were around five cents, and in October 2025 it peaked near $126,000.

Why? Because people want to pay for it. Its price rests on expectations of its future and the value people assign to it. If people believe Bitcoin will reach $200,000, they'll buy at $80,000 today to profit, and that belief drives the price up. If fear and uncertainty take hold and people stop trusting it's worth that much, they sell and move their capital where they see value, and the price falls. For something like Bitcoin, price really is about what people believe.

What about things people can't live without?

Now consider things that are real, tangible, and costly. Healthcare is the one I know best. How are hospital prices set, and is that the real price?

Hospitals list their own prices for every service, based on internal calculations of their costs: running the building, payroll, debt, and so on. Surprisingly, one 2023 study in Health Affairs found that cash prices and commercial negotiated rates averaged 64 percent and 58 percent of chargemaster prices at the same hospital, and that both tended to be consistent percentage discounts off the list price. The list price works as an anchor for negotiation, not a figment nobody uses. But it is still a listed price, not what is actually paid.

What insurers pay depends on their leverage and bargaining power, and what Medicare pays is set by the government. According to RAND's hospital price transparency study, commercial plans in 2022 paid hospitals an average of 254 percent of what Medicare would have paid for the same services at the same facilities. Some states averaged under 200 percent. So different payers pay different prices for the same service.

Who, then, pays the full list price? No one does voluntarily. The patients who may be charged that rate are the ones with the least bargaining power: the self-pay, the uninsured, and those whose insurance is out of network. In healthcare, price is set far less by cost or ordinary demand than by bargaining power.

What it looks like from the bedside

As a physician, I see the other side of these numbers. What a patient owes depends almost entirely on the coverage they have, and on what they paid for it. Depending on the plan, a hospital stay can end with no bill at all or with thousands of dollars out of pocket. I have met families who were bankrupted by a single extended ICU stay for diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a life-threatening complication of diabetes.

The worst part is that patients have no way to know what a hospitalization will cost before it happens. Once they are admitted, they have almost no control over the cost, and they usually find out the total only afterward. Most American families cannot absorb a surprise like that from their savings, and it often becomes a major setback in their financial lives.

This is what demand that can't be postponed looks like. When the product is food, shelter, or health, buyers have no leverage to walk away, so price is whatever is imposed. A price you cannot see in advance and cannot refuse is hard to call a market price at all.

An emergent system

So price is not a fixed term. It is a dynamic one, a living system that constantly responds to supply, demand, human behavior, expectations, and subjective value, and sometimes it is simply imposed. For NFTs, Bitcoin, and lavish extravagance, it seems to lie in the eye of the beholder. That may seem unfair, but no single person is steering it. Price emerges from collective human behavior, inside rules that some people do write, such as the government's Medicare rates. The only participants in the economy are humans, so it is shaped entirely by what we do together, like an ant colony or a beehive. It is a system of our own design that no other living being takes part in.

My cat is oblivious to all of this. She couldn't care less whether Bitcoin is $1 or $1 million, as long as she can play with her toy mouse and laser, eat, drink, and sleep in a warm bed. For me, it's fun and fascinating to watch how prices emerge and shift with the economy and with human behavior. In some way, it's like learning about ourselves.

More about who's writing this is on the About page. If this got you thinking, or you'd push back on any of it, I'd genuinely love to hear it: sharma.rujjwal [at] gmail [dot] com. Want a note when something new goes up? Say so in your email and I'll add you to the list.