Imputation

Impute: to assign a value to something by inference from the value of the products or processes to which it contributes.

As in “recovering the initial outlay plus imputed interest.”

Those high school English teachers, they’d take that transitive verb, consider the related noun and call it a implied contributive computation.

Maybe they’re onto something there.

But maybe I’m incorrectly assuming that impute and imputation are related.

In economics, the theory of imputation maintains that factor prices are determined by output prices.

Which is a fancy way of saying that the value of a good or a service is determined by the consumers, by way of what price they are willing to pay. This being instead of some calculation based on the cost of producing the good or service plus a margin.

In yet another permutation, imputed income is when someone avoids paying for services by providing the services to themselves (e.g. avoiding the cost of a prostitute with a bit of masturbation), or when a person avoids paying rent for durable goods by owning the durable goods.

An example of the latter is when someone lives in their own property and therefore passes up on any rental income they could get in exchange for not owing an equivalent amount of rent to someone else. This person also avoids paying income tax on any rental income they would get from renting the property.

When it comes to receiving company dividends in Australia, New Zealand and Malta (yep, just the three countries), an imputed dividend is where some or all of the tax paid by a company on its profits is attributed to the shareholder by way of a tax credit to reduce the income tax payable on the shareholder’s increased income resulting from the distribution via dividends.

Having reviewed all this, it would appear to me that in the world of finance and economics that any shifty transfer of an obligation is labelled as some sort of imputation.

Commonly this is known as a SEP or Someone Else’s Problem. Rather than being a implied contributive computation I would suggest that an imputation is an implied non-contributive computation.

Further, I would impute that an imputation is so-labelled to confuse and befuddle those that don’t benefit from them.