Economic uncertainty, like we are living through right now, can make regular purchasing decisions challenging. Even more so decisions around big life moments, like changing your job, buying a house or deciding when or if to get married.

These choices have major consequences in our lives and finances; can a better understanding of economic theory help us make better life choices?

Daryl Fairweather is chief economist at Redfin and author of “Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work.” She joined “Marketplace” host Kimberly Adams to talk about how to apply economic theories to our choices in order to get winning results. A transcript of their conversation is below.

Kimberly Adams: I chuckled when I saw the title of your book because obviously it’s a play on the “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” idea. But why should people be thinking about economics and a lot of these decisions in our lives as games that you can apply economic principles to?

Daryl Fairweather: Well, the way that economists view different scenarios like an interaction between an employee and a boss or an interaction between a home seller and a home buyer is similar to the way that board games or video games work, where players have objectives, they have skills, and they interact with one another to win. But also, I think it can help people overcome some of the anxiety they have about achieving their goals in their career or their life because seeing it as a game, I think, just takes the pressure off, and I think it gives you more agency to just find a winning strategy.

Adams: You write a lot about sort of using these concepts of economics and game theory and strategizing how you play various games, and a big part of that is what information you have versus what information the other parties in any kind of negotiation have. And you use a really interesting example in the book about job hunting and gamifying that experience to have the most edge. Can you talk about the decision that you made about how you set up your resume?

Fairweather: So my name is Daryl Fairweather, which is a gender-ambiguous name and also kind of a racially-ambiguous name. Most people think about Daryl Strawberry, the famous Black baseball player, a man, or Daryl Hannah, the white woman actress. So depending on how people interpret my gender, it also dictates how they interpret my race. My middle name is Rose. So if I want people to know that I’m a woman, I include my middle name: Daryl Rose Fairweather. But I know it also makes people less likely to think of me as Black, even though I am biracial and Black. So when I submitted my resume last time I was applying for a job, I included Daryl Rose Fairweather to signal that, because the economic research shows that white women are more likely to be called back for interviews than Black men. So I use that information to help give myself a little bit of an edge, even though, you know, it is an unfortunate thing that I did to have to kind of manipulate how people perceive my race and gender.

Adams: You use a lot of pop culture references in this book to demonstrate how these economic games play out in real life, and you use a lot of examples from Destiny’s Child and their breakup. It comes up many times throughout the book. Can you give us a rundown of how that breakup went down and why it resonated with you so much that it ends up scattered throughout your book on sort of how economics play into regular life?

Fairweather: Well, I love Beyoncé; I consider myself a member of the Beyhive. But the Destiny’s Child example stuck with me. It was, I think, the most salient example of a negotiation gone wrong. Back when Destiny’s Child was early in their careers, they were a four-member group with Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia and LeToya, but LaTavia and LeToya started to feel like they were being not as appreciated as Beyoncé, and they thought that it was their management, Beyoncé’s dad, Matthew Knowles was their manager and giving Beyoncé preferential treatment. So they came to the group and issued an ultimatum that it was either them or Matthew Knowles, the manager. And I think they thought that, given that they were early in their career, the top priority would be keeping the group together. But I think what they misunderstood was what the actual goals were of Matthew and perhaps Beyoncé, that Beyoncé was the star, and that the group would survive without them. And that, I think, is something that I related to, especially early in my career. I thought that my value was my potential, but I came to realize that my employer valued me because I would work hard and work long hours, and once I realized that, it made me understand that I needed to find a new job opportunity in order to get the career that I really wanted.

Adams: You say at the end of the book that you titled it “Hate the Game” because you don’t want people hating themselves for playing the game of capitalism in its current unfair form, because it’s kind of what we’ve got. But playing to win doesn’t necessarily make you complicit in the system’s flaws, and I think that’s something a lot of people really struggle with; like you can see the problems in this economy, but at the same time, you still kind of have to work within it if you’re going to be individually successful. How do you encourage people to navigate that?

Fairweather: Well, I think that capitalism, or the current form of capitalism that we have, is unfair. It does reward people who already have wealth, who already have connections. And going from the bottom to the top is incredibly challenging, but I think that just having an understanding of economics, understanding your place in the economy, understanding at a very micro level how negotiations will go or how asking for a promotion might turn out for you, can help you just move through the economy faster and get to where you want to be faster. And I think holding on to your own values, to your own vision of where you want to be, is really important in terms of not letting capitalism change you. I think a lot of people, they get caught up and playing in the career game, and then that’s all they know how to play when there are other games out there to play like the family game, or traveling, if that’s what you’re into, whatever it is that you are working towards, making sure you hold onto it.