An important viewpoint in classifying games is this: Is the sum of all payments received by all players (at the end of the game) always zero; or is t… - John von Neumann

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An important viewpoint in classifying games is this: Is the sum of all payments received by all players (at the end of the game) always zero; or is this not the case? If it is zero, then one can say that the players pay only to each other, and that no production or destruction of goods is involved. All games which are actually played for entertainment are of this type. But the economically significant schemes are most essentially not such. There the sum of all payments, the total social product, will in general not be zero, and not even constant. I.e., it will depend on the behavior of the players — the participants in the social economy. This distinction was already mentioned in 4.2.1., particularly in footnote 2, p. 34. We shall call games of the first-mentioned type zero-sum games, and those of the latter type non-zero-sum games.