(P.S. What's the point of a name no one knows?)
I didn't say that no one knows him by a name. I just said they don't know him by the name 'the Trickster'. They know him by the name, 'the Economist'.
Also, the point can be seen in any superhero/supervillan comic, spies, witness protection, etc.
Alright, let me put it this way.
You know two people of pretty good means, say an annual income of a million dollars. The first hasn't spent a cent as far as anyone can tell, the second spends much more freely. You discover that a multimillion-dollar, um, spaceship or something has been built in secret. The first guy promptly builds more spaceships so more people can buy them, and accuses the second of having built the first spaceship. Which is more suspicious?
This game is one of politics, not just 'money'. In politics, people primarily remain with their constituents, in this case, what they have created. Since the gods are neither Omnipotent or Omnipresent and the field of play is infinite in size, while your statement could prove true, they could just as easily suspect that 'the Economist' has carefully built up his own domain in a far off area so it wouldn't be messed with, and, since the area that would be required to search is infinite, they would be unable to find it without acts, and if those acts are spent, the area could be behind a shield too powerful for their acts to pierce, and since the god that manages to break that would have spent up acts searching and breaking a barrier would not be able to exploit the opportunity before their opposition gets in there and messes around first. Since no one desires that their enemy gets to affect a location first, they would consider that a waste of acts, which would be disadvantageous on other fronts, so it wouldn't be done.
To increase the illusion that this was done, 'the Economist' could construct an area before anyone searches for the area, which would lead to the belief it was always there and give him a fairly effective power base.