@admin @SnoopJ
It's not quite that binary. Markets decay fairly gradually.
Markets are a multi-round game. In each round, participants allocate capital. In the subsequent round, the people who allocated it more efficiently are given more capital to allocate (note all of the caveats from the previous post in this).
If there's a small amount of information asymmetry, but many participants, the market itself acts as an information-discovery channel. Imagine a simple commodities market where you're buying bags of grain but can't see how full they are before you buy. If the variation is only 5%, no one will lose particularly badly but the people who picked the sellers who sold more-full bags will get more capital next round because they're able to do more of whatever they do with grain (make flour for bread, for example). And that provides feedback in the other direction: other people in the next round will favour those suppliers because the people who used them did better last time. Over multiple rounds, the optimisation works and the information about which sellers give short measures spreads and they have to lower their prices to be able to sell anything.
If the information asymmetry is more pronounced, this doesn't work as well. If the amount of grain you get is between 0 and double what you expect, then some buyers will make no money and possibly drop out of the market altogether (can't sell bread, no money, no business). Others, through luck rather than judgement, will double their investment and will now have a lot more capital to invest next round.
The market in this example failed badly in the first round (capital wasn't effectively distributed) but now can't easily correct either. Some people who are no better at allocating capital than others now have a lot more capital. They may decide to spread it between two sellers. On average, they'll break even, but any round where they make more increases their share of the total resources.
There's a nice game that models this. Imagine you a load of participants who each start with $10. Every round, they're betting on the outcome of a coin toss. Each participant can bet 10% of their capital. At the end of the first round, you'll have a load of people with $9 and a load of people with $11. But the second round, the people with $9 will be allowed to bet 90¢, the people with $11 can bet $1.1. If you lose the first round and then win the second, you have $9.90. The same applies if you won in the other order if you bet the maximum amount. But consider someone deciding in their second round to bet only $1. They now have $12 if they win, $10 if they lose. They can structure their outcomes so that, whatever happens in the second round, they're better off than someone who lost in the first round.
Play this game for a few dozen rounds and you'll see wealth concentration.
And this is why markets work best when you have very high upper tax benefits and antitrust regulations.
