Hans Mayer, Zurechnung (1928)

Hans Mayer’s encyclopedia entry examines how production goods acquire value from the consumption goods they help produce, and how these valuations inform factor prices and income distribution. Its five sections define the problem, reconstruct its history, criticize competing solutions, develop Mayer’s positive account, and extend it to market exchange. An extensive international bibliography situates the argument within contemporary debates. The entry combines a survey of imputation theory with a substantive revision: factor values must be explained through the formation of the overall production plan, not calculated retrospectively from an already completed allocation.

Vom Werte ihrer Produkte her erhalten die Produktionsmittel ihren Wert.

English translation: Means of production receive their value from the value of their products.

This dependence creates a difficulty absent from the immediate valuation of consumption goods. Production requires complementary inputs, yet economic decisions concern separately available quantities of land, labor, materials, and equipment. Knowing the value of their combined output therefore does not establish their individual significance. Imputation answers a practical question arising in every economic organization: what utility depends on possessing more or less of a particular input? Taking factor prices as given merely evades the theoretical task of explaining their formation. The relevant objects are concrete quantities, not the abstract indispensability of “labor” or “land.”

Mayer separates economic imputation from judgments about just remuneration. Its apparently normative language concerns allocations conducive to the greatest total satisfaction, not moral entitlement. He also distinguishes economic value from physical causation, while insisting that valuation requires an identifiable material effect. A technically productive input need not possess economic value: abundant, freely replaceable resources can contribute physically without any satisfaction depending on possession of their particular units.

The historical section presents subjective value theory as the condition for a general imputation problem. Classical cost theories usually derived product values from factor costs, reversing the explanatory direction Mayer defends. Ricardo’s differential rent theory supplies a partial exception. Thünen anticipates marginal productivity; Gossen recognizes the broader problem of complementary goods; Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser develop its general theoretical formulation. Mayer treats Anglo-American marginal productivity theory as an important special approach within this wider field.

The decisive disagreement concerns whether imputed values hold alternatively or simultaneously. Böhm-Bawerk’s loss method identifies what would disappear if an input were removed, but its results arise under different hypothetical conditions. His appeal to replacement values postpones the problem because those values themselves require explanation. Wieser instead seeks simultaneous productive contributions through equations describing different input combinations. Mayer objects that these can yield economically irrelevant averages or presuppose the marginal values they are meant to establish. Marginal productivity theory likewise mistakes conditional output changes for each factor’s own product and does not, Mayer argues, establish that the resulting shares exhaust actual output.

Against claims that complementarity makes imputation impossible, Mayer distinguishes two kinds of material attribution. Yield-enhancing inputs may produce identifiable improvements in quantity or quality. More generally, variation can establish the output dependent on adding or removing an input under particular circumstances. This latter dependence is not a universally separable physical contribution. Nevertheless, it supplies the material basis needed for valuation.

Der weitaus häufigste und zugleich der Kernfall der Zurechnung ist der der technisch variablen Grenzkombination oder -kombinationen.

English translation: The overwhelmingly most frequent case, and at the same time the central case of imputation, is that of the technically variable marginal combination or combinations.

Mayer’s positive account begins with available resources, ranked needs, and knowledge of technical possibilities. Economic planning forms combinations that satisfy more urgent needs while sacrificing as little alternative satisfaction as possible. Marginal employments emerge at the end of this process; they cannot simply be assumed as its starting point. Actual economies generally revise inherited arrangements incrementally, but theory must explain how the experience guiding those revisions becomes possible.

Several cases require no imputation proper. Inputs also consumed directly can derive their marginal valuation from that use. A scarce input combined with free or relatively surplus complements receives the product’s value. An input whose marginal function merely enhances yield takes the value of that enhancement. Under static, undisturbed conditions, capital goods transmit the values of their constituent original inputs; disrupted or developing economies require further analysis. Exactly complementary supplies in a completely rigid combination prevent determinate individual attribution, but Mayer maintains that this exceptional situation also supplies no practical occasion for it.

Letzteres ist das Ziel der Zurechnung.

English translation: The latter is the aim of imputation.

“The latter” refers to determining absolute utility magnitudes, as distinct from relative importance. Mayer’s proposed solution first measures effective utility losses from small input withdrawals, allowing released complements to be reassigned elsewhere. These losses do not themselves constitute simultaneously valid factor values. Instead, he treats them as ratios and allocates the actual utility of the marginal combinations proportionately. This conversion from alternative losses into simultaneous shares is his central constructive move.

The final section translates the account into competitive price formation. Consumers supply original valuations; entrepreneurs organize production and formulate maximum bids for inputs; factor owners seek the most remunerative uses. Marginal employments constrain bids, and the lowest entrepreneurial demand layer needed to absorb supply determines market prices. These prices are simultaneously producers’ costs and factor owners’ incomes. Mayer thus makes imputation the link between subjective valuation, production, and functional distribution, while locating them within a circular interdependence: incomes shape consumer demand, demand guides production, and production generates incomes.