Where does transaction collide?

In economics a transaction is an exchange of goods, services, or money between parties, and the resources spent to find, negotiate, and enforce that exchange are its transaction costs. Coase's 1937 The Nature of the Firm argued that because using the market carries such costs, firms exist to organise some exchanges internally instead, and Williamson's 1979 Transaction-Cost Economics made the single transaction the basic unit for deciding how a dealing should be governed. The referent is an economic exchange weighed by its cost, tracked in prices and effort, and it is not an all-or-nothing unit of work in a database, an exchange between states of mind in therapy, or a security arrangement in commercial law.[1][2]

Unit

One exchange between parties, priced and costed

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through prices, contracts, and the costs of search, bargaining, and enforcement

In databases a transaction is a unit of work run against stored data that either completes in full or leaves no trace, so a system never records only half of an operation. Haerder and Reuter's 1983 Principles of transaction-oriented database recovery gathered these guarantees under the label ACID, meaning atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable, so that a transaction commits as a whole or rolls back as a whole even amid failures and competing users. The referent is an all-or-nothing computing operation defined by those guarantees, and it has nothing to do with a priced market exchange, an exchange between states of mind in therapy, or a legal dealing over property.[3]

Unit

One atomic unit of work that commits or rolls back whole

Recovery means

On failure the whole unit rolls back, restoring the prior state

Measured by

Verified by the ACID guarantees, by commit and rollback behaviour, and by isolation under concurrency

In transactional analysis a transaction is the basic unit of social exchange: one person's message, sent from a Parent, Adult, or Child state of mind, and the reply it draws from the other person's matching state. Berne's 1958 Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy built a theory of social interaction from these paired exchanges and from the states they run between. The referent is a unit of human interaction between states of mind, read from what people say and do, and it is unrelated to a priced market exchange, an all-or-nothing operation in a database, or a security arrangement in commercial law.[4]

Unit

One message and its reply between two ego states

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read by observing the ego states behind each message and reply in interaction

In commercial law a secured transaction is a dealing in which a debtor grants a creditor a security interest in property, the collateral, so that the debt is backed by a claim the law will enforce if payment fails. Kripke's 1951 The Modernization of Commercial Security under the Uniform Commercial Code described how the Code drew many older security devices into one legal category of the secured transaction. The referent is a legal arrangement that creates enforceable rights over property, defined by statute and contract, and it is not a priced market exchange, an all-or-nothing database operation, or an exchange between states of mind in therapy.[5]

Unit

One legal dealing granting a security interest in collateral

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established by statute and contract, and tested by the rights and priorities it creates