The marketplace is primarily about cooperation and only secondarily about competition

Paul Rubin, The Capitalist Paradox: How Cooperation Enables Free Market Competition, Truth on the Market, 21 August 2019.

The final point, and what ties it all together, is a discussion showing that the economy is actually more cooperative than it is competitive. There are more cooperative relationships in an economy than there are competitive interactions. The basic economic element is a transaction, and transactions are cooperative. Competition chooses the best agents to cooperate with, but cooperation does the work and creates the consumer surplus. Thus, referring to markets as “cooperative” rather than “competitive” would not only reduce hostility towards markets, but would also be more accurate.