Back to The Undercover Economist homepageHow much attention should you pay to those emails marked "high priority"? Not much: it’s all cheap talk. But why not make the signal more credible by adding:
a virtual currency element to e-mail in a bid to help people cope with information overload. Anyone sending a message adds some of their limited supply of virtual coins, called Serios, to show how important they consider that e-mail to be.
My question: how should your supply of Serios vary with your position in the company hierarchy? Should the boss get more, because her messages are more important? Or fewer, because she needs fewer?
Here is the company behind the idea, the man behind the company, and the BBC source.
Here is Marshall Van Alstyne’s proposal to make people pay if recipients judge the message to be spam.
Tim writes about the economics of everyday life. His 