An ontological account of the action theory of economic exchanges

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of ontologically well-founded conceptual models for Information Systems in areas such as Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are central phenomena in these areas. For this reason, they occupy a prominent position in modelling frameworks such as the REA (Resource-Event Action) ISO Standard as well as the FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology). In this paper, we begin a well-founded ontological analysis of economic exchanges inspired by a recent ontological view on the nature of economic transactions. According to this view, what counts as an economic transaction is based on an agreement on the actions that the agents are committed to perform. The agreement is in turn based on convergent preferences about the course of action to bring about. This view enables a unified treatment of economic exchanges, regardless the object of the transaction, and complies with the view that all economic transactions are about services. In this paper, we start developing our analysis in the framework of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).