Exchange Valuation: An Empirical Test.

Abstract The article focuses on the comparison of the responses in the barter case to those in the cash exchange and that no exchange cases revealed significantly more variation in the barter case. This could be interpreted as evidence that the conventional theory is incomplete. The discriminant analyses provided more direct evidence. First, in the book value versus market value analysis the author was unable to predict group membership from the situational variables. It appears that a minority, 23 percent of practitioners hold that the purchase rule, Book Value group should be applied to barters without regard to the situation. A majority 77 percent hold that either a sale or majority rule, Market Value group should be applied to barters. This division may be interpreted as the existence of two different conventional theories. Second, although one was able to identify a liquidity, acquisition and conservatism effect, the majority of the total variance remained unexplained. This may be interpreted as indicating that other implicit criteria exist which has not been identified.