also Equivalent Exchange
The following is a quote from Thomas Widlok in his chapter 'The myth of reciprocity of his 2017 book: "The Anthropology of the Economy of Sharing"
It is instructive to see how the broad claims of reciprocity as a universal of all transfers among humans have been falsified in a piecemeal fashion and with them the associated claims that have become less and less defensible in the light of emerging evidence. The first feature that had to be given up was that of equivalence. Sahlins’ (1988) much reiterated distinction of negative, generalized and balanced reciprocity was an attempt to maintain the notion of reciprocity despite the fact that two out of three types were in fact not exchanges of equivalences at all. Although widely quoted, this was an attempt to keep sharing in the framework of reciprocity at the cost of watering down the concept beyond recognition.
And he continues:
As Gell (1999) and others have pointed out “re-ciprocity” without a forward and return movement makes little sense. One of the reasons why this model nevertheless continues to be popular, especially outside economic anthropology, is that it proposes a forceful correlation between modes of economic transaction (“negative”, “balanced” and “generalized” reciprocity) and modes of social organization (house, lineage, village, tribal, intertribal). Sahlins’ well-known diagram (Sahlins 1988: 199)
even suggested that the modes of transaction could be mapped onto the living arrangements of transfer partners in a single two-dimensional graph of concentric circles with “house” and “generalized reciprocity” at its centre, “negative reciprocity” at the outside and “balanced reciprocity” in between. As with all simple models this represents some features of reality better than others.