House Wins!

    The theoretical structure of zero-sum two person games ignores a basic fact that anyone who has visited a casino will tell you. Everytime a game is played, the house, the socioeconomic context of that game, wins. Poker is thought of as a zero-sum game but the house always gets its cut.
    If I buy a computer from you, it is a guessing game and a negotiation as to what the value of the computer really is since at any given moment in the economic picture there is a cost/benefit value to that computer in terms of what I will do with it and this value can theoretically be computed ex post facto. That is the nature of market transactions. I cannot know the value of the computer and neither can you so we reference similar transactions, a game in itself, and make our best guess.
    When the sale is complete, taxes are paid, paychecks are honored, corporate bonds paid, and profits, point of sale and up the line, are generated. The house wins. Zero-sum two person games are amenable to mathematical modeling. The question is, are they amenable to reality. Can we extrapolate the behavior and the model to actual market activity?  A few months ago I proposed a simple systems theory model that would context the transaction game. Add in a cut for the house, the political economy, and that model would fly as a replicated building block of an actual economy. With a scaled out computer doing parallel processing, the computation is doable.
    Are the mathematics of a transaction game with a cut for the house doable? I don't know. I'm not John Von Neumann. I am just suggesting a possible systems model that is easily in reach of reality.
    Do well and be well!