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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 offor requested a particular shift schedulethat you cant 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 its 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 doesnt existfor example, it would be inappropriate to charge people for a job interview. In these scenarios, we dont use prices, but we still decide who gets what. We respond to emails 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 prices changing, a hidden market arises to resolve the excess demand. These hidden markets are under our control. We set the rules to decide who gets what, and we can optimize them. To do so, we must think carefully about what we want our hidden markets to achieve: a set of goals that I call the three Es: efficiency, equity, and ease. Effective hidden markets are efficient, meaning that they do not waste resources and they give resources to the people who value them most. You want to use your precious inbox time to respond to the emails that will generate the most value for recipients. You want to give the day off to an employee who really values it (say prioritizing a once-in-a-lifetime event, like a childs graduation, over something that could happen another day, like a beach trip with friends). You want the job to go to the candidate who is the best fit for the firm. Effective hidden markets are equitable, meaning that they treat people fairly. It would be unfair if one employee always got their preferred schedule while an equally deserving employee was always given something less desirable. Effective hidden markets are also easy to participate in. A hidden market would not be easy if getting what you want required an ordeal, like sending a dozen follow-up emails to get a reply or doing personal favors for a manager to get a preferred day off. This three-E framework can help you improveand even optimizethe hidden markets you control. When I open my inbox, I think a lot about whether I am using my time efficiently. Doing so requires triaging anything that isnt important. Among my important emails, I first look to see if anything requires my immediate attention. When in doubt, I use a last-in, first-out rule for triage, meaning I prioritize emails that came in later to ones that came in earlier. I do this because people who emailed me most recently might still be working on whatever project they had just pinged me about. If so, a snappy reply might be more valuable to them than to someone who emailed me last night. When I look at my calendar, I ask whether I am being equitable in how I allocate my time. This has caused me to question my recurring meetings, which repeat on the same day and time (e.g., each Thursday at 10 a.m.). Recurring meetings impose a first-in-time, first-in-right rule that gives perpetual access to a scarce resource based on the order in which it was originally claimed. A recurring meeting set up a year ago gets priority (for Thursday at 10 a.m.) over anything that comes later. But a new project might be just as worthyor even more worthyof my time than the projects whose meetings are clogging my calendar. It is unfair (and possibly also inefficient) to give it the dregs. Rules for staff scheduling might be based on seniority or worker tenure. In workplaces with regular turnoverwhere a person who sticks around long enough will eventually go from getting to pick last to getting to pick firstsuch rules might be fair. But if the same set of workers get their first choices for decades while workers who started a few years later are consistently out of luck, this is no longer equitable. To combat this, many workplaces use first-come, first-served rules to let workers claim vacation days or preferred shifts. While first-come, first-served is familiar and ubiquitous, it is not necessarily easy for market participants. Employees might have to make requests before they know what schedule would be ideal and, if there is a race to sign up, employees must be vigilant about asking immediately once requests start being accepted. But a thoughtful market designer can make these systems easier and more equitable by building in memory, so workers who did not get their first choice this year get priority next year and perhaps by building in a fair lottery (rather than choosing based on whose email request arrived a few seconds earlier). In these situationsand in many otherswe are market designers who must resolve excess demand by allocating scarce resources to the many people who want them. Considering the three-Es can help us generate allocations that are efficient, equitable, and easy for market participants. If we do it right, we can achieve a fourth E: elevating us as market designers, so we are as happy as possible with the outcomes.
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E-Commerce
The U.S. Treasury Department is considering a $1 commemorative coin bearing President Donald Trumps likeness in honor of America’s 250th birthdayand to celebrate the president, too. U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach shared a first draft of the coin on social media on Friday. The coin features Trumps profile on one side, along with the words IN GOD WE TRUST and the dates 1776 and 2026. The other side features the president raising his fist next to an American flaga pose similar to the images of Trump raising his fist after an attempted assassination in July 2024. The words FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, which Trump had chanted to the crowd in that moment, also appear along the edge of that side of the coin. No fake news here. These first drafts honoring Americas 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real, Beach wrote in a social media post. Looking forward to sharing more soon. Why is the U.S. minting a new $1 coin? In preparation for the 250th anniversary of the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Congress in 2020 authorized the U.S. Mint to issue new $1 coins in 2026 with designs emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial. In 1976, when the U.S. celebrated 200 years since 1776, a $1 coin was minted featuring the Liberty Bell and the moon. According to the U.S. Mint, the country’s commemorative coin program has raised more than $500 million in surcharges. That revenue goes to funding for federal museums, monuments, historical sites, and more. The most recent commemorative coins, featuring abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Greatest Generation, were issued in 2024. Fast Company has asked the Treasury Department for comment, but did not immediately hear back. Trump coin could challenge precedent Many former presidents, including most recently George H.W. Bush, have been featured on commemorative coins, but U.S. law forbids the Treasury from minting and issuing a coin displaying a “living former or current President. The law, which dates to 1792, refers to coins created specifically to celebrate a president, however. Presidents may appear on such a coin only once two years have passed since their death, according to the law. It is unclear how the law might apply in the case of a coin issued for another purpose, such as the 250th anniversary, Reuters noted. A spokesperson for the Treasury told Fox Business that the draft is among other designs being considered. While a final $1 dollar coin design has not yet been selected to commemorate the United States semiquincentennial, this first draft reflects well the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, even in the face of immense obstacles, the spokesperson said.
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E-Commerce
The U.S. Space Force on Friday announced it will assign five of seven critical military missions for the coming fiscal year to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The awards are a $714 million boon to SpaceX, underscoring the companys continued dominance over Pentagon space contracts, despite Musk and U.S. President Donald Trumps public falling out earlier this year. United Launch Alliance (ULA) will undertake the two other launches; it was awarded $428 million for two launches, according to a press release viewed by Space News. SpaceX pulls ahead on Pentagon launches The awards are made under the National Security Space Launch Program, which earlier this year selected SpaceX, ULA, and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin for 54 missions scheduled between fiscal 2027 and 2032 as part of its National Security Space Launch Program (NSSL)contracts worth $13.5 billion. Space is the ultimate high ground, critical for our national security, said U.S. Space System Command official Col. Eric Zarybnisky in a release, per Air Space and Forces. We continue to assure access to that high ground. Delivering assets to the warfighter is our ultimate mission, and we rely on our strong government-industry partnerships to successfully achieve that goal,” Zarybnisky said. Fast Company has reached out to the Space Force for comment. The missions assigned to SpaceX include launches for a communication satellite, three classified payloads, and a reconnaissance satellite. The Space Force makes its awards two years in advance, so these launches will likely take off in 2027. Blue Origin pushes for Mars mission The awards also underlined the fact that Blue Origins New Glenn rocketthe companys rival to SpaceXs Falcon Heavyhas yet to be certified for national security launches. No missions were assigned to the third provider, Blue Origin, which has its next opportunity for a mission in FY27, Space Systems Command said in a statement, per SpaceNews. Blue Origin’s New Glenn is slated to launch a NASA mission to Mars as soon as the end of this monthdelayed since 2024that could bring it closer to receiving certification, however.
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E-Commerce
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