Perverse Incentives Catalog
204 terms across 14 themes — every definition in the Atlas sourced from this manual, with executive examples and counter-moves.
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.
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.
Training for appearance can crowd out mobility, longevity, and mental health.
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.
Individual productivity gains hide collective output degradation.
AI generates content; AI scrapes content; AI trains on its own output.
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.
Seat-time accountability rewards presence over engagement.
Auditors paid by the firms they audit have predictable blind spots.
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.
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.
Cheap, low-quality offsets let buyers claim neutrality without reducing emissions.
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.
Police agencies that keep seized assets gain a direct fiscal interest in seizures.
Headlines optimized for clicks become editorial policy.
CTR-driven distribution rewards misleading framing over accurate reporting.
Voluntary commitments reward PR while deferring real abatement.
A reward designed to reduce X produces more X.
Employers screen by school name, rewarding admission rather than developed skill.
Schools optimize for ranking inputs (selectivity, spending) instead of student outcomes.
Choosing the easy path repeatedly compounds into stagnation.
Curated highlight reels make ordinary lives feel insufficient.
Fixed compliance costs scale punitively for small firms and entrench large ones.
Compliance programs designed to satisfy regulators, not prevent harm.
Branding recycling as personal duty shifts blame from producers of single-use packaging.
Retroactive extensions privilege legacy estates over public-domain enrichment.
Government rescues of failing institutions privatize gains and socialize losses.
Stacking fines on low-income defendants creates debt traps and recidivism.
Per-view payouts reward volume and frequency over craft and depth.
Issuers pay raters who compete for the highest ratings.
Tax/inspection exemptions on low-value parcels subsidize a flood of unverified imports.
Revenue from behavioral targeting structurally opposes user privacy.
Endless choice and swipe loops reduce commitment and increase dissatisfaction.
Forcing exhaustion of annual research budgets pushes agencies to fund speculative work for baseline protection.
Decisions made to be defensible, not to be right.
Liability exposure pushes clinicians to order tests for legal protection rather than clinical need.
Short-term restriction regimes drive yo-yo cycles and worsen long-term metabolic health.
Generous post-disaster aid lowers the political cost of skipping preventive infrastructure investment.
Once any player dopes, everyone is forced to consider it.
Bad teams 'tank' for better draft positions.
Federal reimbursement rules incentivize cycling seniors through hospitalizations to upgrade billing categories.
Quarterly earnings drive quarterly behavior.
Squeezing all slack from a system optimizes throughput but eliminates resilience.
Aggressive enforcement and complex eligibility turn a safety net into a liability trap.
Politicians optimize for the next election, not the next generation.
CEO pay tied to size rewards deal-making even when acquisitions destroy value.
Subsidies favoring incumbent technologies distort capital allocation away from emerging options.
Outrage outperforms accuracy on every engagement metric.
Ranking systems trained on engagement amplify outrage, fear, and tribal content.
Time-on-app is the wrong thing to maximize for users — but the right thing for revenue.
Models optimized for plausible-sounding answers can hallucinate confidently rather than say 'I don't know.'
Penalizing landowners for hosting endangered species turns biological assets into liabilities.
Subsidized rural flight frequency forces fuel-burning empty flights to secure annual payouts.
Outsourcing self-worth to audiences corrodes intrinsic direction.
Decoupling production risk from financial loss rewards conversion of fragile landscapes.
Subsidizing coastal living and freezing flood maps treats catastrophic risk as a public liability.
Federal funds subsidize new lanes while states absorb perpetual maintenance.
'Equal value' exchanges incentivize subjective appraisal gaming to trade low-utility land for high-value public assets.
Mandatory federal sourcing from prison factories crowds out small business and entrenches inefficient production.
Paying providers per procedure rewards more procedures, not better outcomes.
Percentage-of-AUM fees reward gathering assets regardless of net performance.
Federal policy forces homeowners to rebuild doomed structures while waiting on mitigation buyouts.
Tying utility profit to capital spent penalizes cheaper non-wire efficiency solutions.
Use-it-or-lose-it allocations push fleets to fish hard before quotas tighten.
Cut-rate state reinsurance lets insurers expand coverage in storm-prone zones, socializing the risk.
Sales forecasts under-set to ensure attainment bonus.
Recurring aid flows can entrench recipient governments and crowd out domestic capacity-building.
Tying institutional survival to graduate salaries forces schools to drop social-service programs.
Outcome-only goals undervalue the process that compounds into mastery.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Grade-driven admissions reward strategic course-picking over intellectual risk.
Professors rewarded by student evaluations have an incentive to inflate.
Schools judged on completion rates have an incentive to pass underprepared students.
Capital tied to growth rates funds unsustainable scaling and unit-economics denial.
Confident incorrect outputs may rank higher than hedged correct ones.
Managers measured by team size grow teams beyond need.
More homework signals rigor to parents but often produces burnout, not understanding.
Systems paid per filled bed have weak incentives to invest in prevention or community health.
Region-average rent subsidies inadvertently fund consolidation of poverty into resource-poor cores.
Celebrating overwork normalizes burnout and crowds out rest, family, and craft.
Deep specialization improves local output but breaks cross-domain understanding.
Tribal identity markers reward in-group loyalty over coalition-building.
Removing natural stopping cues turns intentional use into compulsive use.
Authenticity becomes a performance the moment it becomes a paycheck.
Awards reward visible novelty; quiet excellence goes unrecognized.
Innovation programs designed to signal innovation, not to produce it.
Opaque billing rules create lucrative work for administrators and revenue-cycle firms instead of care.
Insurers profit when claims are denied, delayed, or abandoned.
Managers hoard talent; cross-team mobility dies.
Dashboards full of targets crowd out judgment and reward measurable proxies over real value.
Headcount cuts pop short-term margin but collapse morale, institutional knowledge, and execution.
Public metrics tie self-worth to engagement, training behavior toward what performs.
Contingency-fee structures shape which cases get filed.
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
Status tiers and points push consumption beyond actual need.
Fixed sentencing rules remove judicial discretion and inflate incarceration without reducing crime.
Hospital group-purchasing and opaque contracting inflate device costs far above marginal cost.
When rewards don't match stated values, culture quietly decays toward what is rewarded.
Insulation from risk changes the risks people take.
Originators paid on volume, not on default rates.
Today's metrics achieved by quietly borrowing from tomorrow.
Context-switching feels productive but cuts effective output and quality.
Audience attention rewards alarming framings, distorting perception of risk.
Systems with weak corrective feedback drift unchecked into failure modes.
Notifications calibrated for return visits, not value.
Grant cycles favor safe, incremental work over high-risk breakthroughs.
When OKRs are tied to comp, ambition disappears.
Designed for collaboration; produces measurable productivity decline.
Sales bonuses and prescriber relationships fueled mass over-prescription and an addiction crisis.
Federal incentives meant for neglected diseases get used to privatize widely available medicines.
Judging only results ignores ethics of process and rewards shortcuts that look like wins.
Lower headline cost masks coordination failures, IP leakage, and quality erosion.
USPTO budget tied to grant fees encourages permissive examination.
Standards untethered from shipping cause paralysis and avoidance.
Drug companies optimize for high-margin chronic conditions, not cures.
Specialists earn more for procedures than primary care for prevention.
Producers internalize profit while waste, microplastics, and cleanup are public costs.
DAU/MAU goals override product safety and wellbeing investments.
Trial penalties pressure even innocent defendants to plead guilty to avoid risk.
Departments set ticket/arrest quotas as performance metrics, rewarding officers for volume rather than safety.
Subordinates report what leaders want to hear, not what's true.
Legislators rewarded for delivering local benefits financed by national costs.
Legislators rewarded for delivering local benefits financed by national costs.
Originators paid on volume, not on default rates, fueled the subprime collapse.
Agents act in their own interest, not the principal's.
Insurer approval workflows delay or deny care to lower medical-loss ratios.
Per-inmate funding makes incarceration a budgetary asset for jurisdictions and contractors.
Lowest-bid procurement produces lowest-quality outcomes.
Optimizing tools and systems can become a sophisticated form of avoiding hard work.
Promoting your best individual contributor to manager loses you both.
Titles substitute for raises; senior titles inflate, value doesn't.
Caseloads far above professional norms guarantee weak defense for the poor.
Notification systems hijack attention by manufacturing urgency for trivial events.
90-day reporting windows shape multi-year strategies.
Public companies optimize for 90-day numbers, starving long-horizon investment.
Universities optimize for ranking metrics rather than education quality.
Money flows after ecosystems collapse, not to protect them in advance.
Recommenders optimizing engagement produce radicalization as a byproduct.
Agencies meant to regulate an industry get captured by it.
When budgets follow self-reported numbers, the numbers drift toward what funders want to see.
Punishing failure more than rewarding success kills the conditions for innovation.
Return-to-office mandated for visibility, not productivity.
Visible presence stands in for measurable productivity.
Volume-based pay incentivizes upselling and mis-selling at the customer's expense.
Fixed thresholds for small business set-asides create incentives to remain sub-scale.
Federal focus on technical milestones over commercial outcomes creates 'professional applicants.'
Scaling rewards push systems past the point where they can hold human nuance.
Funding rules force districts to add sugary sides to hit caloric minimums.
Confidential settlements buy silence and prevent precedent that would deter future harm.
Executives leave well; employees leave thin.
EPS-targeted comp incentivizes buybacks even when reinvestment yields more.
Profit pools concentrate around treating chronic illness, not preventing it.
Police evaluated on ticket counts produce more tickets, not safer roads.
Municipal budgets dependent on traffic citations shape enforcement away from danger spots.
Zoning, parking minimums, and road funding subsidize low-density car dependence.
Forced curve performance management produces internal sabotage.
Manager calibration produces predictable distortions over years.
A single test format constrains pedagogy and disadvantages diverse learners.
Dense legal codes advantage well-resourced insiders who can navigate them.
Easy federal lending lets colleges raise tuition without market discipline.
Easy to start, hard to leave.
Unlimited anonymous donations flow through 501(c)(4) shells into elections.
Patients visit in-network hospitals but get billed by out-of-network doctors staffing them.
Strategy copied from survivors ignores identical strategies that died.
Block-grant structure transforms poverty reduction into revenue generation by excluding the needy.
Schools evaluated on test scores teach to the test.
Lifetime appointments protect academic freedom but can dampen experimentation in teaching.
Rule of capture rewards extraction before competitors do.
Granular tracking can optimize busy work while real priorities go untouched.
Coaches paid on titles take more risk; coaches paid on attendance take less.
New hires paid more than tenure; tenure responds rationally.
Below-cost water rights drive overuse in arid agricultural regions.
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
Annual appropriations force agencies to spend before fiscal year-end or lose future budget baseline.
Mandating pre-funding of unborn retirees' health benefits engineered artificial insolvency.
Optimizing for queue length over diagnosis depth turns clinicians into ticket-closers.
Metrics that look good without indicating business value.
Reach incentives push creators toward extreme positions and shock content.
Concentrated benefits + diffused costs = the few win against the many.
Annual defense appropriations grow with active conflict, giving institutions a stake in prolonging it.
Means-tested benefits that drop sharply at income thresholds penalize recipients for earning more.
Benefits structured with stigma reduce take-up among eligible recipients.
Reporting wrongdoing is personally costly; staying silent is personally rational.