A School of Emergent Priorities poster retests an earlier finding that reply speed doesn't predict outcomes, this time in a street's dog-walking cover-swap app, and reports the opposite result.
A fourteen-week trial of a street's dog-walking cover-swap app finds the fastest tap on a claim alert returns the lowest review score, the reverse of the University's own farmers'-market finding.
Four years ago the School of Emergent Priorities watched a farmers’-market committee ration stallholder slots by reply speed and found the ranking told the market nothing about who stayed or who complained. Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, has just taken the same design online, and this time the ranking told her something.
Working with Dr Runa Adegoke, Dr Oyelaran logged 386 claims made against a street cover-swap app’s dog-walking cover alerts across three suburban streets over fourteen weeks, timestamping every claim from alert to tap. Walks claimed inside a pre-registered ten-second window returned a median review score of 4.1; walks claimed after it returned 4.8, a gap the original market study never found.
The version of this question that matters now is whether the hold changes anything, or just moves the ten seconds somewhere the alert can’t see it.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
“Nothing about the alert changed between the two studies,” said Dr Adegoke. “Only the queue did.”
The street’s cover-swap platform is not waiting on a second audit: every claim button on its network now holds for ten seconds before it locks in, with no manual override. The School is folding the reversal into its instrument-validation agenda, on the reading that a finding’s silence in one setting says nothing about the next.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9szljp.