ABSTRACT
Macneil comments as follows: Contractual ordering of economic activity takes place along a spectrum of transactional and relational behavior. At one end are discrete transactions. Discrete transactions are contracts of short duration, involving limited personal interactions, and with precise party measurements of easily measured objects of exchange, for example money and grain. They require a minimum of future co-operative behavior between the parties and no sharing of benefits or burdens. They bind the two tightly and precisely. The parties view such transactions as deals free of entangling strings, and they certainly expect no altruism. The parties see virtually everything connected with such transactions
as clearly defined and presentiated.1 If trouble is anticipated at all, it is anticipated only if someone or something turns out unexpectedly badly. The epitome of discrete transactions: at noon two strangers come into town from opposite directions, one walking and one riding a horse. The walker offers to buy the horse, and after brief dickering a deal is struck in which delivery of the horse is to be made at sundown upon the handing over of $10. The two strangers expect to have nothing to do with each other between now and sundown; they expect never to see each other thereafter; and each has as much feeling for the other as has a Viking trading with a Saxon. A modern example with many of these characteristics is a purchase of non-brand name gasoline in a strange town one does not expect to see again.
