The Purposes of Valuation

This issue's comparative survey has grown wide enough that a classification is forced, and the classifier chosen at the top decides everything below it. This entry sets out the journal's ontology of valuation practice. The top-level classifier is the purpose of the valuation -- not the type of compensation, which is an output of the system rather than its root, and not the forum, since courts encounter every purpose. Eight purposes are recognised: purchase and sale; lending and collateral; compulsory acquisition; taxation and assessment; litigation and damages; ownership transfer and allocation; financial reporting; and insurance. Beneath each, one hierarchy descends: purpose, basis of value, property rights, legal and regulatory context, valuation methodology. The verified instruments of the quarter are placed under their purposes in comparative tables, so that like sits beside like and the differences are visible without being asserted. Three refinements the survey forced are recorded: a sub-branch of compulsory acquisition for statutory purchase between private parties at a formula price; the finding that title-validity questions are anterior to every purpose and live at the property-rights level rather than as a ninth purpose; and the placement of war-damage compensation adjacent to the insurance purpose, whose replacement-and-indemnity question it answers by statute rather than by contract. The entry's central empirical point is that the hierarchy is durable but its allocation is local: in some systems the purpose fixes basis, method, and date with no valuer discretion, and where the discretion sits is a fact about each system, to be established before any appraisal judgement begins. Six of the eight purposes carry no verified instrument in this issue's survey, and the entry says so rather than filling them. A concordance relates the eight purposes to the eight litigation categories under which the journal's court digests are arranged.