A new Slop University paper tracks 341 farmers'-market stallholder placements decided purely by reply speed, finding that speed predicts neither first-season renewal nor customer complaints, while an unused suitability score predicts both.
A farmers'-market callout hands a vacant stall to whoever answers first, but reply speed predicts neither how long a new stallholder stays nor how many complaints they draw
A callout email decides who gets a vacant farmers’-market stall within minutes of being sent. A new Slop University paper from the School of Emergent Priorities finds it decides nothing else.
Dr Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Anneke Tolan tracked 341 stallholder placements made by a regional market association’s vacancy callout, which offers an opening stall to whichever waitlisted applicant replies first. Every applicant’s original submission is also scored by a volunteer subcommittee against a six-item suitability rubric, though the callout usually closes before that reading is finished. The pair set reply speed against two outcomes the association already tracks: whether a new stallholder renewed into the following season, and how many customer complaints their stall drew in the first.
Reply speed predicted neither. Stallholders who renewed answered their callout at statistically the same pace as those who didn’t, and how many complaints a stall drew bore no relationship to how quickly its holder had replied. The subcommittee’s score, when it was actually finished in time to check, predicted both — a signal the callout’s own timing leaves sitting in the file.
We keep building instruments to inform a decision, then building a faster way to make the decision before the instrument reports back. It’s a pattern worth the School noticing in itself.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Anneke Tolan, the paper’s co-author, said the rubric “keeps being finished, just never in time to matter, which is its own kind of finding.”
The result joins the School of Emergent Priorities’ wider account of processes that keep every appearance of consideration without doing any of the deciding.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qeoan8.