Transactions in Generativity: Future Value, Attribution, and Institutional Form

Abstract

Some transactions concern a productive or creative capacity whose future exercise can generate further capacities, outputs, relations, and options. A present payment offers a compact exchange coordinate, while the transacted position may also include control, licensing, attribution, participation, reversion, governance, and exposure to uncertain downstream trajectories. This paper proposes the term transaction in generativity for an arrangement whose object includes a declared generativity or a material position governing its future exercise. The proposed evaluation method preserves a typed profile containing the trajectory law, reachable repertoire, position bundle, temporal value coordinates, descendant rule, attribution registers, uncertainty, and third-party standing. Three elementary results establish the framework's formal limits. First, an undiscounted infinite-horizon flow diverges when it remains bounded below by a positive constant after some date. Second, normalized descendant-allocation weights preserve an allocated total as a bookkeeping identity. Third, equal current payments and equal expected output leave the institutional position underidentified. Two countermodels further show that equal expectations can preserve sharply different risk and option structures. The paper compares sale, fixed-term licence, continuing return, equity, stewardship, and shared governance as configurable ideal types. Each form changes several positions and introduces its own monitoring, revision, foreclosure, and third-party questions. The paper's scope is conceptual and formal. Empirical estimation, fair pricing, legal classification, universal alienability, and general justice principles remain open research tasks. The main proposal is a profile-preservation discipline for research on transactions whose object extends beyond a present output.