Service (economics)

[1] Examples include work done by barbers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, banks, insurance companies, and so on.

Public services are those that society (nation state, fiscal union or region) as a whole pays for.

Examples: The service consumer must sit in the hairdresser's chair, or in the airplane seat.

It can never be exactly repeated as the time, location, circumstances, conditions, current configurations or assigned resources are different for the next delivery, even if the same service is requested by the consumer.

Many services involve variable human activity, rather than a precisely determined process; exceptions include utilities.

Any service can be clearly and completely, consistently and concisely specified by means of standard attributes that conform to the MECE principle (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive).

[citation needed] In some service industries, especially health care, dispute resolution and social services, a popular concept is the idea of the caseload, which refers to the total number of patients, clients, litigants, or claimants for which a given employee is responsible.

Classical economists contended that goods were objects of value over which ownership rights could be established and exchanged.

Adam Smith's famous book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, distinguished between the outputs of what he termed "productive" and "unproductive" labor.

The former, he stated, produced goods that could be stored after production and subsequently exchanged for money or other items of value.