The Gravitation of Market Prices as a Stochastic Process

The theory of value has been based ever since Adam Smith on the idea that the market prices of commodities, those at which actual trade takes place, gravitate around a central position known as natural prices. This paper seeks to develop a statistical idea of the process in question and suggests in particular that market prices can be said to gravitate around natural prices if the probability of their means being very close to natural prices after t observations tends to 1 as t tends to infinity. A set of possible conditions leading to that result is also presented.