Your inbox is full of new e -mails and you have to decide which one you can answer quickly and which one you have to ignore. You try to plan something for next week, but your agenda is already full of recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a certain day off – or asked for a certain shift schedule – that you cannot provide all their requests. You make a vacancy for a single position and get 250 applications.
These situations constantly arise in our working life and their analogues occur in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to deal with them. We walk through our inbox and move things on our agenda. We follow (perhaps unwritten) rules to determine which employees receive requests and which do not. Sometimes we decide that it is too much to find out ourselves and outsource the whole goal to AI.
The common theme of the examples above is what economists call surplus question, which arises when more people want something than we can serve.
Economists have a go-to solution for surplus demand: rising prices. When prices rise, fewer people think it is worth it, or even feasible, to pay for the thing so that they no longer ask for it. But there are times when the price does not exist – for example, it would be inappropriate to charge people for a job interview.
We do not use any prices in these scenarios, but we still decide who gets what. We respond to e -mails and take meetings. We decide who gets the day off and who gets the best shift schedule. We interview candidates and eventually hire someone.
Instead of changing prices, a “hidden market” arises to resolve the surplus demand. These hidden markets are under our control. We set the rules to decide who gets what, and we can optimize them.
To do this, we have to think carefully about what we want our hidden markets to achieve: a series of goals that I call the three e’s: efficiency, equity and convenience.
Effective hidden markets are efficient, which means that they do not waste resources and they give resources to the people they appreciate the most. You want to use your valuable inbox time to respond to the e -mails that generate the most value for recipients. You want to release the day to an employee who really appreciates it (say priority to a one -off event, such as the graduation of a child, about something that could happen another day, such as a beach trip with friends). You want the job to go to the candidate that best suits the company.
Effective hidden markets are fair, which means that they treat people honestly. It would be unfair if an employee always got his preferred schedule, while an equally earning employee always got a little less desirable.
Effective hidden markets are also easy to participate. A hidden market would not be easy if getting what you want require a test, such as sending a dozen follow-up e-mails to get an answer or to give personal favors for a manager to get a preferred day free.
This framework with three ee can help you improve the hidden markets that you check and even optimize and even optimize.
When I open my inbox, I think a lot about whether I use my time efficiently. This requires triads of everything that is not important. Under my important e -mails I first look to see if something requires my immediate attention. When in doubt, I use a last-in, first-out rule for triage, which means that I prioritize e-mails that later came in to those who entered earlier. I do this because people who have mailed me the most recently, maybe still work on the project they had just placed on me about. If so, a tough answer can be more valuable for them than for someone who e -mailed me last night.
When I look at my agenda, I ask if I am fair in how I assign my time. This led me to question my recurring meetings, which repeat on the same day and time (for example every Thursday at 10 am). Recurring meetings impose a first-in-meal, first-right rule that gives eternal access to a scarce source based on the order in which it was originally claimed. A recurring meeting set up a year ago is given priority (for Thursday at 10 am) above everything that comes later. But a new project is perhaps just as worthy – or even more worthy – of my time than the projects whose meetings hide my agenda. It is unfair (and possibly also inefficient) to give it the droesem.
Rules for planning staff can be based on seniority or employee management. At workplaces with regular turnover – where a person who lingers long enough will eventually go from choosing the latter to choose the first to choose the first time – such as rules can be fair. But if the same set of employees get their first choices for decades, while employees who started a few years later are consistent bad luck, this is no longer fair.
To combat this, many workplaces use the first-come, the first grinds rules to allow employees to claim vacation days or preference shifts. Although it comes first, it comes first, is known and omnipresent, it is not necessarily easy for market participants. Employees may have to make requests before they know which schedule would be ideal and, if there is a race to register, employees must be vigilant to ask immediately as soon as requests are accepted.
But a thoughtful market designer can make these systems easier and Bilder by building in memory, so employees who did not get their first choice this year will be given priority and perhaps to build in a fair lottery next year (instead of choosing on the basis of whose e -mail request arrived a few seconds earlier).
In these situations – and in many others – we are market designers who have to solve surplus demand by assigning scarce resources to the many people they want. Given the triple, we can help generate allocations that are efficient, fair and easy for market participants.
If we do well, we can reach a fourth e: elevate ourselves as market designers, so we are as happy as possible with the results.
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