ner of the physiologist or psychologist taking the
measure of his subject's reactions, sensibilities, and preferences than
the more masterful procedure of the physician or the hypnotist who seeks
to uproot or modify or reconstruct them. This is the process known in
economic writing since Adam Smith as "the higgling and bargaining of the
market."

In fact, the individual's ante-market valuation, when there temporarily
is one, is an exchange valuation of the constructive or experimental and
therefore (in any significant sense of the word) perfectly objective
type, and the market process into which this enters is only a perfectly
homogeneous temporal continuation of it that carries the individual
forward to decisive action. There is no more reason for a separation
here than for sundering the ante-experimental sketching out of an
hypothesis in any branch of research from the work of putting the
hypothesis to experimental test. The results of experiment may serve in
a marked way in both sorts of process to elucidate or reconstruct the
hypothesis.

The "higgling and bargaining of the market" has been accorded but scant
attention by economists. It has apparently been regarded as a kind of
irrelevance--a comedy part, at best, in the serious drama of industry
and trade, never for a moment hindering the significant movement and
outcome of the major action. As if to excuse the incompetence of this
treatment (or as another phase of it) theory has tended to lay stress
upon, and mildly to deplore, certain of the less amiable and engaging
aspects of the process. The very term indeed as used by Adam Smith,
imported a certain aesthetic disesteem, albeit tempered with indulgent
approbation on other grounds. In Boehm-Bawerk's more modern account this
approbation has given place to a neutral tolerance. A certain buyer, he
says (in his discussion of simple "isolated" exchange), will give as
much as thirty pounds for a horse; the horse's owner will take as
little as ten pounds--these are predetermined and fixed valuations
brought to the exchange negotiations and nothing that happens in the
game of wits is conceived to modify them. The price will then be fixed
somewhere between these limits. But how? "Here ..." we read, "is room
for any amount of 'higgling.' According as in the conduct of the
transaction the buyer or the seller shows the greater dexterity,
cunning, obstinacy, power-of-persuasion, or such like, will the price be
forced eithe