Both the baseball and Elvis print have some monetary value to them though. I don't buy much in terms of collectors items, but when I do it's always under the thought that I will always be able to get my money out of it if I wanted.

I don’t believe that the value of memorabilia is ultimately driven by some sort of pyramid scheme, as would be implied if the only value to a collector is what they could sell it for.

I would argue that the value is ultimately driven by people who want to own an item at a given price. People who are Elvis fans may want to buy an item and hold it forever, because of the nostalgia value for them.

The collector's value is what allows for the high market value though, because it can substitute for some other store of value. You have some money, instead of keeping it as cash in a mattress or shares of the Dow Jones, you buy some memorabilia which is expected to hold its value or increase. Then you get to enjoy it, but the value is still there if you need to liquidate it.

It basically allows you to have the thing for only the difference between its investment value and the (presumably higher) investment value of an index fund, rather than having to pay its full price with no hope to ever get it back. Which causes the market price to be a lot higher than it would be otherwise.

Another aspect is the bragging rights in a community of other fans. It's like a status symbol.

I'm reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics and the idea of inherent value is addressed in the 2nd chapter:

“The most fundamental reason why there is no such thing as an objective or “real” value is that there would be no rational basis for economic transactions if there were. When you pay a dollar for a newspaper, obviously the only reason you do so is that the newspaper is more valuable to you than the dollar is.

At the same time, the only reason people are willing to sell the newspaper is that a dollar is more valuable to them than the newspaper is. If there were any such thing as a “real” or objective value of a newspaper—or anything else—neither the buyer nor the seller would benefit from making a transaction at a price equal to that objective value, since what would be acquired would be of no greater value than what was given up. In that case, why bother to make the transaction in the first place?”

I understand that it is a vocabulary choice, but I take issue with calling the price non-objective in that case.

As a toy example, imagine Alice farms Bananas and Bob farms Apples, but each is only able to eat the other food. They would both happily trade forever as they both gain value from this. This doesn't mean that the value is _subjective_, it means the value is _situational_, and I think the rigid vocabulary term and the connotations of the word are conflated a lot.

Assuming this scenario implies each needs to eat 1 banana and 1 apple, the Thomas Sowell outline still holds: Alice, having 2+ bananas, needs 1 apple more than the extra banana. And vice versa for Bob. Any bananas/apples beyond those needed to eat don't have any value at all.

The value in your example is still subjective. What is the ratio of Bananas to Apples that is being traded and how much is being produced? While both are certainly willing to keep trading indefinitely, and to not do so would be catastrophic, but the actual price being paid is very subjective to the market players.

This is what happens when the language is unclear - the word "value" has different meaning in each context.

"Value" as in "utility", and "value" as in "currency" or unit of account.

When trading some currency for utility, each side of the transaction gains something more than what they gave up. The buyer of food got food they needed to eat. The seller of food (presumably has so much food they cannot eat it all) gains extra currency that they can use elsewhere.

The value of a newspaper depends on how many I have. If I have none, I want one, but probably not two. If I printed a million, I just want to sell them (and amortize what I paid the staff).

But the Elvis was the one and only "King of Rock and Roll", and these are sex workers (for the lack of better word) who don't have anything that isn't already provided by thousands of other sex workers (or rather millions).

Millions of people can sing “I want to be a hound dog”