wealth of nations game

[stone]

Playing monopoly with my brother's children prompted me to dream up this game. It would only require some coins and a note book and could help make arithmetic fun for children to practice. It is a sort of "national fiscal policy game". I guess the aim is to entice wealthy residents into your country and to keep out freeloaders whilst at the same time having enough "production". Does it sound easy and fun?

The aim of the game is to maximize the wealth of your "nation".

Each player is a nation with seven citizens each represented with a 1p,2p,5p,10p,20p,50p and £1 coin. Each player controls a country -deciding tax, benefits and borrowing.  For each round, each nation can decide whether each of its citizens is resident in the home country or resident in another player’s country.
At the start of the game, the 1p citizen has wealth of £1000, the 2p citizen £2000 and so on with the £1 citizen having £100000.

For each round of the game, the coins are flipped. Those coins that land heads up increase that citizen's wealth by 50%. Those that land tails up lose 40%.

Each country, at the start of each round declares to what extent they will socialize winnings –pooling that proportion of each resident’s winnings and distributing that tax revenue evenly between each resident (eg it could be 0%, 10%, 50% or 100% of the winnings). Foreign citizens and home citizens get taxed and receive benefits to and from the country in which they are resident.

Each country, at the start of each round declares whether they will borrow money (or pay down previous borrowings) and by how much. Borrowings must be immediately distributed evenly to each resident. If a country has borrowed money, they must have tax revenue of at least 10% of outstanding borrowing each round- otherwise the player is out of the game. Borrowings can be paid down out of tax revenue.

Once each country has declared its fiscal stance, the nations decide which of their citizens will be resident in which country; the coins are flipped and the revenue is distributed or retained by the citizens to be carried over to the next round.

At the end of the game, each nation’s wealth is assessed as the aggregate wealth of all the citizens minus the outstanding debt of that nation’s borrowing.

[stone]

Perhaps I should have mentioned that the best strategy if there was only one player would be to have 100% socialization of the winnings. You'd steadily gain if you did that whilst without socialization, you'd lose essentially everything after a while (1.5x0.6=0.9<1). BUT clearly it becomes more complex factoring in who lives where.

I don't know what the optimal level of borrowing would be even with only one player. I guess Kelly's criterion could work that out for various levels of risk tolerance?