Incentive Super-Response Tendency

People respond to incentives with such power and predictability that poorly designed incentives reliably produce perverse and destructive outcomes.

• British colonial rulers offered bounties for dead cobras in India; locals bred cobras specifically to collect the reward — worsening the problem.
• Paying lawyers by the hour incentivizes them to work slowly and never resolve anything definitively.
• Soviet nail factories given quotas by weight produced absurdly heavy nails; given quotas by number, they made tiny, useless ones.