Feng shui is all very well, but the next time you decide to redesign the layout of your office space you might consider calling an economist. That's because an astonishing new set of data from Google – where else? – has allowed economists to track something that had been utterly ethereal: the flow of information around a physical office space.

    The data come from Google's trials of something called an internal prediction market. Prediction markets are most famously used to forecast presidential elections. If Barack Obama is trading at 35 cents on the Democratic nomination market, that is what punters are willing to pay for a ticket that will pay a dollar if and only if he wins the nomination. In that case the market is giving Obama a 35 per cent chance.

    Prediction markets aren't perfect, but they often beat alternative forecasting mechanisms. That is why some companies have started to experiment with them by asking their own employees to bet on sales and revenue figures – the alternative being to rely on the bureaucracy's own forecasts, which are often made by people with a vested interest in sitting on bad news.

    Google is not the first to try: according to Bo Cowgill, of Google's economics group, and academic economists Eric Zitzewitz and Justin Wolfers, other pioneers include ArcelorMittal, Chrysler, Eli Lilly, General Electric and Hewlett Packard.

    The markets seem to work quite well. But that is not the most interesting thing to emerge from the analysis by Cowgill and his co-authors. By looking at which Google employees trade in which markets (betting on, for instance, how many users Google's Gmail service will attract by the end of the quarter) and on which side of the trade, they have a good idea about who has what information. And by looking at who else makes similar trades, they can draw conclusions about who has similar information at similar times.

    If this was an ordinary company, the researchers might try to correlate information with the organisation chart, and that would be about all there was to say. But this is Google. Cowgill, Zitzewitz and Wolfers had the precise GPS location of each desk (Google offices are open-plan). They had information about which employees were on the same e-mail listings, such as the poker group. From a survey, they had a list of each employee's friends. They knew which bosses they worked for, which projects they worked on, and where they went to college. All they lacked were the names of the employees, which were stripped out of the database.

    The results were striking. Clear correlations existed between the trading behaviour of certain groups of employees. But they were not explained by shared interests or by social connections. Having the same immediate boss only explains a little about information flows.

    No, it is the office layout that matters: people who sit near each other tend to know the same things, as evidenced by making similar trades on the prediction markets. Social and professional proximity matters very little for the flow of information: physical proximity is almost everything.

    Specialists in organisational behaviour have known for a while that people tend to interact much more with those who sit nearby, but it has never been clear whether that was just social grooming. Now we know that real information is flowing.

    We keep being told that because of cheap, ubiquitous communication technology, distance is dead. But if there was ever a company that we should expect to exemplify that idea, surely it was Google. This research suggests that it is as important as ever to be sitting in the right place.

    風水固然重要，但下次當你決定重新設計辦公室布局的時候，你或許會考慮請個經濟學家。這因為，有一組令人驚異的新數據已經問世，能讓經濟學家追蹤某種曾經完全像空氣一樣的東西：信息在辦公室物理空間的流動。這一組數據來自谷歌(Google)——不然還能是哪兒呢？

    該數據來自谷歌所謂的“內部預測市場”試驗。預測總統大選是“預測市場”最有名的應用。如果巴拉克•奧巴馬(Barack Obama)在民主黨提名市場上的交易價是35美分，那就是說，賭客們愿意出35美分購買一份相應合約，當且僅當奧巴馬贏得提名時，賭客們將憑借該合約而贏得1美元。在這種情況下，市場對奧巴馬獲得提名機會的預測就是35%。

    預測市場并非十全十美，但它們通常比其它預測方法更可信。因此，一些公司開始試行這一市場，要求自家員工對銷售和收入下注，作為公司管理部門自身預測之外的另一種選擇。因為在管理部門中，做預測的人通常會強調壞消息，因為這樣符合他的既得利益。

    谷歌不是第一個吃螃蟹者。根據谷歌經濟學家團隊中的博•考吉爾(Bo Cowgill)和學院派經濟學家埃里克•茲特維茨(Eric Zitzewitz)、賈斯汀•沃爾弗斯(Justin Wolfers)的說法，其它率先開展此類試驗的企業還包括阿塞洛-米塔爾(ArcelorMittal)、克萊斯勒(Chrysler)、禮來公司(Eli Lilly)、通用電氣(GE)和惠普(HP)等。

    預測市場似乎運行得非常良好。但這并不是考吉爾和他的合作者得出的最令人感興趣的結論。通過觀察谷歌員工在哪些市場交易哪些內容（比如猜測截至某個季度末Gmail服務將吸引多少用戶），以及在交易中是買還是賣，考吉爾等人就很清楚哪些員工擁有哪些信息。而且，通過觀察還有其他哪些人進行了類似的交易，三位經濟學家就能知道哪些人在類似時間擁有類似信息。

    如果這是一家普通的公司，研究人員可能會將這些信息與組織結構圖聯系起來進行分析，那么結論可能會是一些老生常談的東西。但這里是谷歌。考吉爾、茲特維茨和沃爾弗斯精確了解每一位員工的座位（谷歌的辦公室是開放式結構）。他們知道哪些員工屬于同一個電子郵件聯系群——比如一起玩撲克的群體。通過調查，他們獲得了每個雇員的朋友名單。他們知道這些雇員為哪些上司工作，在哪些項目中做事，以及在哪里上的大學等。三位經濟學家唯一缺少的信息就是這些員工的姓名，因為那已經被數據庫刪除了。

    分析結果引人矚目。特定群體中的雇員在交易行為方面有著顯著的相關性。但它們無法用共同興趣或社會關系來解釋。擁有同樣的直接上司也只是信息流的小部分原因。

    原來，辦公室布局才是關鍵所在：座位接近的人往往知道同樣的事情，在預測市場進行同樣的交易證明了這一點。社會關系和專業接近對于信息流動作用非常有限：有形空間的接近幾乎是唯一原因。

    組織行為學家目前已經知道，人們往往和那些坐在自己附近的人互動得更多，但他們從來不清楚這是否只是一種社交需要。現在我們知道了：真實的信息正在流動。

    人們一直告訴我們，由于廉價且無處不在的信息技術，距離已經死亡。但是，如果我們期待有一個公司去證明這一說法，那這個公司顯然就是谷歌。這一研究表明，坐在合適的位置上，還是和以往一樣重要。