Marshalling as a game

Investigate the problem of what to put on wire when marshalling (serializing) objects.
Some runtime environments force this decision, at least when it comes to data/code dichotomy.
When it comes to code-is-data view, it becomes very unclear, what should be transferred - think of the reflexive tower - should it be unraveled to its (infinite) roots, or at least down to the fixpoint? What if the receiver of the stream already shares some part of the tower with the sender?
In general, how can they engage in a negotiation that minimizes not only the size of the stream, but also the size of negotiation itself?

It looks it is not really about streams (that's why I do not really like the term serialization), but about identifying the part of the object that needs to be copied, and then grafting that part onto the receiver's view of world).