"What determines the price a company sets for its product?" My intuition about this is that a consumer will only buy a product if they value it more than its p

"What determines the price a company sets for its product?" My intuition about this is that a consumer will only buy a product if they value it more than its price, and a company will only sell it if it cost less than its price. So the price is inherently some point in between the buyer and seller's value of each item. If the price equals the buyer's value, then the seller gets all the profits, and the buyer benefits zero. If the price equals the seller's value, then the seller gets zero profits, and the buyer gets all the benefits. What determines this tradeoff? The long answer involves me learning some basic microeconomics with the help of https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-microeconomics/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-microeconomics/. Maybe one day I will write a longer blog post about it, but I'm still not sure I fully understand the answer. I am still not an economic expert, but here is my attempted answer to practice my micro thinking: the goal of companies is to maximize profits. If they can raise prices while increasing profits, they will do so! The only thing stopping them from doing so is competition from other companies. Depending on whether you have "perfect competition", "monopolistic competition", or flat-out monopoly, their ability to do so will differ. For the companies examined in the article, most of the companies experience monopolistic or imperfect competition. The fact that they can increase profits by increasing prices shows that people have more money to spend than they used to (makes sense, due to pandemic saving, stimulus, and a tight labor market and inflation leading to wage growth). Prices will increase until consumers feel enough pain that they transition back to whatever previous mix of thrifty and luxury goods they were using before the pandemic. Is that right? But then this analysis leads to even more questions...