By Judd Kessler, CHIBE affiliate
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 off—or requested a particular shift schedule—that you can’t grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications.
The common theme of the examples above is what economists call excess demand, which arises when more people want something than we can serve.