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.

    风水固然重要，但下次当你决定重新设计办公室布局的时候，你或许会考虑请个经济学家。这因为，有一组令人惊异的新数据已经问世，能让经济学家追踪某种曾经完全像空气一样的东西：信息在办公室物理空间的流动。这一组数据来自谷歌(Google)——不然还能是哪儿呢？

    该数据来自谷歌所谓的“内部预测市场”试验。预测总统大选是“预测市场”最有名的应用。如果巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)在民主党提名市场上的交易价是35美分，那就是说，赌客们愿意出35美分购买一份相应合约，当且仅当奥巴马赢得提名时，赌客们将凭借该合约而赢得1美元。在这种情况下，市场对奥巴马获得提名机会的预测就是35%。

    预测市场并非十全十美，但它们通常比其它预测方法更可信。因此，一些公司开始试行这一市场，要求自家员工对销售和收入下注，作为公司管理部门自身预测之外的另一种选择。因为在管理部门中，做预测的人通常会强调坏消息，因为这样符合他的既得利益。

    谷歌不是第一个吃螃蟹者。根据谷歌经济学家团队中的博•考吉尔(Bo Cowgill)和学院派经济学家埃里克•兹特维茨(Eric Zitzewitz)、贾斯汀•沃尔弗斯(Justin Wolfers)的说法，其它率先开展此类试验的企业还包括阿塞洛-米塔尔(ArcelorMittal)、克莱斯勒(Chrysler)、礼来公司(Eli Lilly)、通用电气(GE)和惠普(HP)等。

    预测市场似乎运行得非常良好。但这并不是考吉尔和他的合作者得出的最令人感兴趣的结论。通过观察谷歌员工在哪些市场交易哪些内容（比如猜测截至某个季度末Gmail服务将吸引多少用户），以及在交易中是买还是卖，考吉尔等人就很清楚哪些员工拥有哪些信息。而且，通过观察还有其他哪些人进行了类似的交易，三位经济学家就能知道哪些人在类似时间拥有类似信息。

    如果这是一家普通的公司，研究人员可能会将这些信息与组织结构图联系起来进行分析，那么结论可能会是一些老生常谈的东西。但这里是谷歌。考吉尔、兹特维茨和沃尔弗斯精确了解每一位员工的座位（谷歌的办公室是开放式结构）。他们知道哪些员工属于同一个电子邮件联系群——比如一起玩扑克的群体。通过调查，他们获得了每个雇员的朋友名单。他们知道这些雇员为哪些上司工作，在哪些项目中做事，以及在哪里上的大学等。三位经济学家唯一缺少的信息就是这些员工的姓名，因为那已经被数据库删除了。

    分析结果引人瞩目。特定群体中的雇员在交易行为方面有着显著的相关性。但它们无法用共同兴趣或社会关系来解释。拥有同样的直接上司也只是信息流的小部分原因。

    原来，办公室布局才是关键所在：座位接近的人往往知道同样的事情，在预测市场进行同样的交易证明了这一点。社会关系和专业接近对于信息流动作用非常有限：有形空间的接近几乎是唯一原因。

    组织行为学家目前已经知道，人们往往和那些坐在自己附近的人互动得更多，但他们从来不清楚这是否只是一种社交需要。现在我们知道了：真实的信息正在流动。

    人们一直告诉我们，由于廉价且无处不在的信息技术，距离已经死亡。但是，如果我们期待有一个公司去证明这一说法，那这个公司显然就是谷歌。这一研究表明，坐在合适的位置上，还是和以往一样重要。