Embeddedness and Price Formation in

Prices are a crucial and thrifty piece of infor-mation bound to almost all commercial goods or services. Familiar terms such as price discrimination, price wars, price fixing, con-sumer price indices, price rigidity, shadow prices, price tags, and so on signify the key role of prices in society and how markets can fail if the price-setting mechanism falters. At the level of the firm, pricing is the key means by which rents are appropriated: If a firm sets prices too low, it may fail to capture the profits needed for reinvestment and growth (Zbaracki et al. forth-coming). More than just the sum of money that changes hands in a marketplace, prices enable resource allocation and the comparative valua-tion of goods and services. The vital importance of prices suggests the need for a sociological understanding of them (Swedberg 1994). Classical sociology focused on the impact of prices on stratification (Mar