There can be no general theory of valuation for individual entropic items, if only because no one would pay anything for information they already know. Entropic valuation is thus idiosyncratic or contextual, since all valuations must be conditional on prior entropic states.
In this paper, I argue that entropic value can be found in any communication event that transmits an entropic item from one entropic system (a person or computer, or part thereof) to another.
It is worth noting, before proceeding further with valuation of items, that there is rarely a well-defined boundary to any entropic item. Such items are generally embedded in a context of a continuing sequence of communication. This context is often more entropic than the item itself. For example, we might define the entropic items in a telephone conversation to be the sentences uttered. A sample item under this definition might be a verbalised ``Yes.'' This would be an extremely valuable item, to someone who has just asked whether a loved one has been released from the hospital. By contrast, another ``Yes'' would be much less valuable to the same individual, at another point in the same conversation, immediately after asking whether it was a humid day in Auckland.
Despite the inherent ambiguity in references to ``entropic items,'' however, I will continue to use this term in this paper to denote any entity that can affect the state of an entropic system.