Kirzner’s summary of the market process, toward the end of chapter 3:
The market process tends to present market participants with alternatives that approximate those opportunities they would choose if they possessed all the relevant information. The market process achieves this without making it necessary for market participants to learn all this detailed information. Instead, the market reveals any lack of coordination resulting from ignorance by market participants of potentially available opportunities through the emergence of price discrepancies. Where this kind of ignorance persists, the opportunity exists for the first discoverers of the price discrepancy to step in and win profits. In doing this they wipe out the price discrepancy itself, and thus remove the lack of coordination resulting from the limited market knowledge of market participants. (Market Theory and the Price System, 45.)
Kirzner emphasizes that, in a market system, the “quest” for profits completely subsumes and substitutes for the effort of economic agents to coordinate better. In a market system as such, where producers bear their own costs and their only income comes from voluntary exchange with consumers of their product, entrepreneurs can only earn profit by discovering and removing inefficiencies, which are, fundamentally, nothing more nor less than contradictions in the expectations of economic agents. (That’s dialectic, baby.)
At this point in the text, Kirzner doesn’t make another point that could also be made here. The market constrains its participants, more or less, to opportunities they would choose if they possessed all the relevant information. But, by assumption, they don’t, because the market accomplishes this without actually communicating all necessary information directly to everyone (something we can recognize is completely impossible). This means that the opportunities open to market participants will never appear ideal to them. It’s only in light of a broader theory, looking at the bigger picture, that we can say the market’s decisions approximate what is socially optimal, all things considered. From any individual’s limited point of view, it will always involve an element of frustration, as they are asked to accept trade-offs that are not as good as what they might imagine they should be offered instead.