CNET News is reporting on Seriosity a startup that is trying to apply the economic model to ensure that really important e-mails get more attention.
Excerpts:
Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency–called the Serio–that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.
Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they believe it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn’t valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message, or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.
But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.
The basic idea is very compelling. However, the overhead of attaching serios to every e-mail message sent could be a hurdle for adoption. But if it actually works, and you can every once in a while spend a whole bunch of serios to ensure that a message gets read by your manager, it might just be worth it.
In any case, this reminds me of this older article, which gives great advice on how to write e-mails (especially the subject line) in a way that will improve its chances of being read, especially when sending to managers and other people higher up in the corporate ladder.