Things don’t have prices, people do. When we buy something : we are paying people to release it to us.It's easy enough to chalk up problems to and prices to "supply and demand" - when the actual interaction between buyer and seller has one more, really important dimension: control. Prices are affected by how much control over supply, and control over demand that each side has.

To show the difference - we look at the real-world famous case of the economy of a Prisoner of War Camp. There, prices moved up and down smoothly - because no one had control. In contrast, there are people who can take such large stakes, or afford to bear such great losses, that that can take over whole markets.

This is important - critically important - because while people may assume that price hikes are due to supply shortages - they may be due to something else entirely - price gouging, monopolies, oligopolies, and profiteering.

Here's the link to Radford's original article.

https://my.vanderbilt.edu/robertdriskill/files/2011/08/POWCampRadford.pdf

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