MICROCOMPUTER PRICES DROP RAPIDLY

Not everything rises in price. Computer prices certainly do not. A study by two economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ernst R. Berndt and Zvi Griliches, finds that on average over the 1982-88 period in the United States, quality-adjusted real prices - that is, taking account of extra memory capacity, greater speed, and other quality factors as well as prices in constant dollars - for microcomputers declined about 28 percent a year.