transactology.org

Research

Lines of inquiry, in current circulation.

Six standing research lines organize the institute's work. Each is led by a senior fellow and updated annually with a synoptic paper. Click a line to read the long abstract.

1. 01 The Anatomy of Agreement Why two parties decide that a transaction has occurred — the cognitive and social conditions of mutual recognition. Read more

   This line studies the threshold at which an exchange is felt to be complete by both parties. Working from comparative ethnography (Estonian land transfers, Senegalese livestock auctions, Manhattan apartment closings), we describe the rituals, signatures, and silences that mark the transition from offer to settled fact. The current monograph, The Closing (2025), compiles fourteen case studies and proposes a typology of closure: notarial, performative, gestural, and digital.

2. 02 Externalities and the Long Ledger Accounting for what a transaction sheds onto third parties — ecological, temporal, and intergenerational costs. Read more

   The Long Ledger Project develops methods for representing the externalities of an exchange across decades and across non-signatory parties (forests, watersheds, descendants). In partnership with the Aarhus School of Environmental Accounting, we maintain an open dataset of 312 transactions reconstructed across full life-cycles. Our 2026 working paper proposes a "long ledger" template adoptable by municipal procurement offices.

3. 03 Computational Settlement How automated systems encode, time, and finalize exchanges — from clearing houses to smart contracts. Read more

   This line examines the migration of settlement from human ritual into machine procedure. We compare the medieval bill of exchange, the SWIFT message, and the EVM transaction as artifacts of the same problem: how to make a promise reliably real. The fellowship has produced a glossary of settlement terms used uniformly across our publications, and contributes to ongoing standards work at ISO TC 68.

4. 04 The Tacit Transaction Exchanges without contract or price — care, attention, attribution, and other unpriced flows. Read more

   Not all transactions are visible to markets. The Tacit Transaction line studies the exchanges that organize family, neighborhood, scholarship, and online community. The 2024 paper Reciprocity Without Receipt argues that the unpriced transaction is not the absence of accounting but a different accounting, one whose ledger lives in memory and reputation. Current work is on attribution debt in scientific authorship.

5. 05 Friction and the Just Exchange When friction protects, when it harms — the ethics of difficulty in transactional design. Read more

   The pursuit of frictionless commerce is itself a moral position. This line documents cases in which friction (a waiting period, a counter-signature, a face-to-face meeting) protects a less-powerful party, and cases in which friction is a tax on the poor. Working with the Tallinn Bureau of Civic Service Design, we are publishing a 2026 monograph titled The Considered Pause.

6. 06 A Lexicon of Exchange A multi-volume reference defining the working vocabulary of transaction across disciplines. Read more

   The Lexicon is a long-horizon project: a definitive multi-volume dictionary of the technical vocabulary of exchange, drawn from law, economics, anthropology, theology, and computer science. Volume I (A–F, 482 entries) was published in 2023. Volume II is in editing. The institute's resident fellows convene biannually to ratify new entries by a two-thirds vote.