ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the explanation that is offered for market prices. This analysis is the most appropriate for demonstrating the radical insufficiency of the Beckerian hypotheses to approach every type of human behaviour, including market exchanges. Hans Mayer based his criticism of the derivation of the law of the equality of marginal utilities on the two hypotheses that sustain it: the continuous character of the utility curves of the economic subjects, and if we start from the hypothesis of market equilibrium, the problem of maximization posed by each individual can only be resolved when this individual assigns any increase in income to guaranteeing the increase in utility of all the goods. Unlike Gary Stanley Becker's economic approach, which attempts to reduce all human behaviour to a generalization of the functional theory of prices, the chapter demonstrates an alternative theory that bases the explanation of prices on the subjective valuations of individuals.
