You control hidden markets at work-it's time to start acting like it

"Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore. You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a particular day off-or requested a particular shift schedule-that you can't grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications."

"These situations arise constantly in our work lives, and their analogues come up in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to handle them. We barrel through our inbox and move things around on our calendar. We follow (perhaps unwritten) rules to determine which employees get requests filled and which do not. Sometimes we decide it's too much to figure out ourselves and outsource the whole endeavor to AI."

"The common theme of the examples above is what economists call excess demand, which arises when more people want something than we can serve. Economists have a go-to solution for excess demand: rising prices. When prices go up, fewer people find that it is worthwhile, or even feasible, to pay for the thing, so they stop asking for it. But there are times when price doesn't exist-for example, it would be inappropriate to charge people for a job interview."

Excess demand occurs when more people want something than can be served, creating everyday choices about who receives limited resources. Prices often resolve excess demand by reducing demand, but many important contexts lack prices—job interviews, meeting time, days off, or shift assignments. In those contexts, people create hidden markets: explicit or implicit rules and procedures that allocate scarce opportunities. Hidden markets can be designed and optimized by deciding priorities and trade-offs. Effective hidden markets should balance three goals—efficiency, equity, and ease—so allocations avoid waste, treat people fairly, and remain simple to implement.

Read at Fast Company