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This perek deals primarily with two elements of the financial arrangement between a groom and his bride's father (who is the presumed financial partner in the arrangement of his daughter's nuptials.)
The first of these is "nidunya", which is a term you'll recognize from our modern-day Ketubot. The "nidunya" is the dowry, the financial package (cash and/or property) that a father provides to his daughter to bring with her into the marriage. The "nidunya" does not become the property of the husband, but he does have full right to utilize it over the course of the marriage. Should the marriage end in divorce or through his predeceasing her, the "nidunya" is returned to the wife. (In our ketubah documents, the husband pledges 100 zuz that will be used to make this return payment, should the need arise. )
Mishnayot 3 and 4 discuss the fact that when a bride brings cash as part of the "nidunya", that cash is valued at 150% of its face value in the ketubah, i.e. in terms of what the husband must pledge to return if they divorce or if he predeceases her. This is because the husband will have the right to invest this cash for the sake of producing profit, thus making the cash of greater value to him than its face value at the time of the wedding. However, the value of the portion of the "nidunya" that is given in household items is actually valued in the ketubah at only 80% of current value. This is either in anticipation of the inevitable wear and tear that these items will endure over the course of the marriage, or that there was an accepted "custom" to actually overvalue the household objects that were part of the "nidunya", as a way of enhancing the generosity of the father / honor of the bride.
Mishnayot 5 and 6 discuss the second of the financial elements, namely the amount the bride's father must provide so that she is able to prepare herself with the material things she needs for the wedding itself. While the amount of 50 zuz is specified as a bare minimum, the Mishnayot make clear that the proper amount is the amount that aligns with the father's general socio-economic status, and that in the case in which a father has died and her bothers are acting in his stead, the Bet Din will become involved if necessary to ensure that the brothers are providing nothing less that what the father is projected to have provided, were he still alive.
Which bring me to a final point. One could ask why any of this is "rabbinic business". Why didn't the rabbis simply decide to let this be a "private matter" between families? There are two answers, I believe. One is that the rabbis had a strong desire to encourage marriages, and the provision of dowry was one way of encouraging men to take wives. And second, the rabbis must have realized that disputes over what the true value of dowries is (as we saw referenced in Mishnayot 3 and 4) were invariably going to wind up in front of a Bet Din anyway, making the wisest course of action a pre-emptive one, i.e. laying out what the normative rules were going to be at the outset.
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