# Coincidence of wants | | The **Coincidence of wants** is an economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item that the other wants, so they exchange these items directly. Within economics, this has often been presented as the foundation of a bartering economy. However, ethnographic research has not corroborated that this model of barter exists in reality. | |-|-| | | wikipedia:: [Coincidence of wants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_of_wants) | [[Money]], [[Currency]]