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Scenario Walkthrough: Marketplace Supply–Demand Imbalance — Liquidity First
Interview-prep walkthrough for two-sided marketplaces: liquidity before GMV, cell-level supply and demand, search-to-fill, zero results, and dual-sided pain (riders and drivers can disagree in the same city). Covers levers, incentives, repositioning, throttles, and why network effects break naive A/B designs.
Why GMV Growth Can Mask a Broken Marketplace
GMV and transaction count can grow while the coordination engine rots. More orders through worse matches, longer fulfillment, higher cancellation, and one-sided churn are classic patterns. Interviewers want decomposition: where the pain lives (geo, category, time), which side is constraint-bound, and whether the limit is visibility (bad ranking) versus true shortage of eligible supply.
Weak answers say "acquire more on both sides." Strong answers name leading coordination metrics: search-to-fill or analogous rates, time-to-first meaningful match, zero-result or empty-search rate, utilization on supply, and repeat-attempt or fallback behavior on demand.