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.