 Product martingale for three-player token exchange

Three players with positive integer holdings exchange a token by choosing an unordered active pair uniformly, then choosing the transfer direction fairly. Let $N$ be the conserved total, and $\tau$ the stopping time of the first elimination. Given holdings $(x,y,z)$ before $\tau$, the conditional expectation of the change of their product is $-(x+y+z)/3=-N/3$: transfers in each pair decrease the mean product by the third holding. Thus the displayed stopped process is a martingale. Its nonnegative product term gives $\mathbb{E}[n\wedge \tau ]\le 3abc/N$, so the monotone convergence theorem first proves integrability of $\tau$. The bounded product then vanishes by the dominated convergence theorem, yielding $\mathbb{E}[\tau ]=3abc/N$. Continuing the deterministic time term beyond elimination instead produces a submartingale.