History
Fundamentally, price systems have been around as long as there has been trade or money.
The institutional economist Thorstein Veblen wrote a tract which was seminal in development of the term as discussed in this article: The Engineers and the Price System. Its chapter VI, A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians discusses the possibility of socialist revolution in the United States comparable to that then occurring in Russia (the Soviets had not yet at that time become a state (USSR formed in 1922)).
From its beginnings, the price system has evolved into the system of global capitalism that is present in the early 21st century. The Soviet Union and other communist nations with a centralized planned economy were controlled price systems. Whether the ruble or the dollar is used in the economic system, the criterion of a price system is the use of money as an arbiter and usual final arbiter of whether a thing is done or not. In other words, few things are done without consideration for the costs and the potential making of a profit in a price system.
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