Whereas the word economy suggests that people in a community possess a common and congruent set of values and goals, catallaxy suggests that the emergent properties of a market (prices, division of labor, growth, etc.)
[1] As is still a common method of explanation today, Aristotle tried to explain complex market phenomena through an analogy between a household and a state, take for example the modern analogy between the national debt of a country's government and a simple consumer's credit card debt.
Aristotle used a common Greek word 'oikonomia' that meant "to direct a single household," and used it to mean the management of an entire city-state.
After being discussed by Ludwig von Mises the term catallaxy was later made popular by Friedrich Hayek who defines it as "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market".
[citation needed] Catallaxy also becomes a new dimension in software design and network architecture.