eh? I'm not calling carrying my cup home a market transaction. I'm calling the following examples market transactions obscured as such because they exchange labor directly for a service:
Google wants to produce a voice recogniztion system. They foot the bill for the labor needed to write the software. It's called 411. They put it on their site and they give it away "for free". When people use it, they end up testing the half-done product. If they had had to pay for that, it would have cost a lot more to hire the labor power to do the testing.
It's a market transaction.
Similarly, when Facebook gives away it's service for free, to you, Carrol, it is a market transaction. You use Facebook for free, but it is paid for by advertising.
Facebook also takes your information and the information of all the people you friend, their photos, their content, and sells it to companies such as Rapleaf. Rapleaf then analyzes the data and sells it to my company so we can have consumer research upon which to develop our products.
When your friends on facebook play games like Farmville and MafiaWars, they are doing the same thing. They are spending time playing a game so that companies can observe their behavior and sell that data to companies that want to know that information to develop products.
If those companies had *hired* people to play games in their testing, we'd call it a market transaction.
But because it is "free" people don't.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)