Economics & Mechanism Design

Discount framing nudges people to buy things they wouldn't otherwise want.

Productivity targets compress visits, raising misdiagnosis and burnout.

A federal mandate intended to lower drug costs for the poor became a profit engine for hospitals and contract pharmacies.

Written rules about how AI may be used internally.

Earn-outs designed to retain founders often demotivate the team they bought.

Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value.

Free products monetize attention, structurally aligning incentives against user time well spent.

Tenure-track jobs replaced by low-paid adjuncts, lowering cost and quality.

Innovators → early adopters → majority → laggards, AI-specific.

Training for appearance can crowd out mobility, longevity, and mental health.

AI system that takes actions to achieve goals, often across tools.

When the agent acts, who's responsible?

Cuts that lift margin this quarter erode product quality and brand equity over years.

Per-bushel subsidies reward overproduction of specific crops regardless of soil, market, or nutritional need.

Autonomous agents deployed before liability frameworks exist.

Augmentation strategy vs. substitution strategy.

Logging of AI inputs, outputs, and decisions.

Inventory of models, data, tools, and dependencies in an AI system.

Tracing AI components for risk and compliance.

Cross-functional governance body for AI decisions.

Agents deployed before anyone owns the consequences.

Stages of organizational AI capability.

Individual productivity gains hide collective output degradation.

AI investment outpacing measurable productivity gains.

Categorizing AI use cases by risk level.

AI strategy = decisions about which capabilities to build and where.

Scarce AI talent commands market-distorting compensation.

Designing processes from scratch around AI capability.

AI generates content; AI scrapes content; AI trains on its own output.

Teams built around AI from day one vs. teams adding it to existing workflows.

Discounting algorithmic advice even when superior.

Annual bonuses reward annual results — risk that blows up in year four with damage in year seven is rational.

Once-a-year feedback rewards once-a-year behavior.

Treating AI as more humanlike than it is.

Seat-time accountability rewards presence over engagement.

Attention is the most contested resource in modern work.

Auditors paid by the firms they audit have predictable blind spots.

Augment when judgment matters. Automate when scale matters.

Reduced vigilance with automated systems.

Systematic skew in model behavior across groups.

Charging by time rewards inefficiency and prolongs disputes.

Expensive off-range storage cannibalizes funds needed for on-range management.

Narrowly tied bonuses get gamed; people optimize the metric, not the underlying goal.

Quarterly bonuses create end-of-quarter behavior changes.

Re-hires often get raises larger than internal promotions.

Strategic choice on AI capability sourcing.

Federal oversight intended to protect tribal assets creates friction that devalues the land.

Being visibly busy signals importance regardless of actual output.

Candidates dependent on large donors become structurally responsive to donor priorities over voter priorities.

The more a quantitative indicator drives decisions, the more it distorts the process it measures.

Punitive online discourse makes nuanced disagreement personally costly.

AI capability outpacing organizational ability to use it.

Cheap, low-quality offsets let buyers claim neutrality without reducing emissions.

AI bolted onto existing workflows to look forward-leaning.

Fame as a goal rewards spectacle over substance.

High-velocity quotas for enumerators turn data collection into fiction-writing.

Pay tied to stock price encourages short-term price management.

Donors penalize 'overhead'; charities under-invest in capacity.

Donors penalize 'overhead' and starve capacity that produces outcomes.

Underpriced externalities keep dirty energy artificially competitive.