But the government instead measures rental prices for the Consumer Price Index, and those have lagged home costs, making overall inflation seem lower than it really is.

The Labor Department reported last week that the Producer Price Index - which measures wholesale prices - fell by 0.2 percent in July.

By contrast, the core rate of inflation, measuring prices for goods other than food and energy, fell at a 1.1 percent annual pace in the June-through-August period.

The Producer Price Index, which measures prices of goods and services at the wholesale level, rose 0.6 percent in August.

The 1968 regulations assumed that most international companies were manufacturers that traded goods with easily measured costs and prices, the senior Treasury official said.

Bachelier's idea already assumes that we have a standard way to measure prices.

Mr. Moore would also revise the component that measures prices of sensitive materials, adding crude oil prices, among other elements.

Mr. Griliches influenced the way the government measures prices of products whose quality changes over time, like pharmaceutical drugs, computers and housing.

The crude-goods index, which measures prices of items entering the production chain for the first time, was up two-tenths of 1 percent.

The simplest way to measure prices is to compute the changes for a fixed basket of goods and services.