To be sure, progress will not be easy, for estimating the value of quality improvements is a painstaking process. It must be done methodically, item by item. But progress can be made. In recent years, we have developed an improved ability to capture quality differences by pricing the underlying characteristics of complex products.
With an increasingly wide range of product variants available to the public, product characteristics are now bundled together in an enormous variety of combinations. A “personal computer” is, in actuality, an amalgamation of computing speed, memory, networking capability, graphics capability, and so on.