@trevortaylor friendly reminder: this market closed on 2026-09-05. Whenever the outcome is known, could you please resolve it? Thanks!

Too many other variables:
If productivity helps and is improving then prices fall as productivity increases.
If scale helps and demand is increasing then prices fall as gains from scale can be more readily exploited.
If supply is strictly limited e.g. fossil fuels, demand is increasing and remaining supply is getting harder to extract faster than productivity gains then prices will rise.

If there are no other constraints, competition psychologically leads to an endless decline in prices (in a stable currency).

@nakamoto But surely there has to be a limit reached where further price cutting leads to companies going bust. Why not move to this lower limit on prices immediately and stay there i.e. not falling ?

@MikhailTal @trevortaylor what does this mean

If "true free market" also includes free from control by corporations then, yes productivity increases and competition will lead to lower, real prices. Even without anti-trust intervention though it seems like monopolies don't last. So we'd just need to look at a larger timespan.

One carveout would be prices of services that don't experience competitive productivity increases. Examples would be education and healthcare. Those prices go up due to Baumol Cost Disease (which is commonly made worse by governments subsidizing demand). If we look at the market as a whole though prices still go down, otherwise AFAIL Baumol wouldn't happen.