Scope note

Text

This class comprises activities of one Actor, the “provider”, providing to another Actor, the “receiver”, some particular entity of identifiable social value that is generally regarded to imply a formal obligation for compensation. The provided entity may be a material service, such as handing out a kilo of potatoes, repairing a car, a payment or loan of a monetary amount, or the granting of rights of ownership or use, etc., and should constitute a well-defined unit. Except for the case of being a gift in the proper sense or an act of bribery, a Provision may initialize an obligation of the receiver to the provider, increase an existing obligation or being itself a compensation already and decrease or terminate an existing obligation of the provider to the receiver. A Provision may or may not be associated with a precise monetary counter-value, agreed or demanded beforehand or afterwards. Be it with or without a defined monetary value, the units of mutual provisions should such that the involved parties should be able to decide when provisions have terminated mutual obligations, different opinions of partners nonwithstanding. In societies maintaining a currency, in a typical market purchase partners would exchange some goods against immediate payment. Such cases should be modelled by specializing this class to the typical, simplified forms of accountable exchange business in a society. But even in such societies, economic difficulties of partners regularly lead to agreements overriding the specified formal monetary equivalents of provisions, which a historically correct model must be able to represent adequately.

Language

en