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The Incentives Lab
Research Center

The authority engine of the Lab.

Original research, executive case studies, and industry-specific breakdowns from the Lab's practitioners and Consortium. Published continuously.
Featured · Case Study
New

Adler over Freud: why incentives pull people forward.

A working paper on irrational behavior, teleological psychology, and the operational case for redesigning the field instead of excavating the past. Includes a 400-engineer case where a 25% calibration shift dropped review latency 41% in 90 days.

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Synthesis
Published

Thought automation, mental models, and goal design.

Three Mental Model Club manuals — Simmons & Pagan — folded into the Incentives OS. New Layer 21 on /layers and 22 new glossary terms (WOOP, chunking, OK plateau, polarity map, Kegan stages, and more).

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Essay
Published · Aaron Bare

Stop selling. Start designing incentives.

What Daniel Kahneman actually taught us about human behavior — and why anchoring, loss aversion, framing, and five other behavioral incentives matter more than ever in the age of AI.

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Archive
Published · 224 articles

The Behavioral Economics Guide Archive.

A fully searchable, credited archive of every article from the 2023, 2024, and 2026 Behavioral Economics Guides — indexed by author, topic, and Incentives OS layer.

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Working Paper
Published

Social engineering is an incentive exploit.

Phishing, BEC, and MFA-fatigue attacks don't hack people — they read the comp plan more accurately than the company does. Includes a help-desk case where reversing three knobs eliminated MFA-bypass incidents in six months.

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Working Paper
Published

Conspiracy theories are an incentive market.

Belief follows payoff. A four-payoff demand model, a supply-side map of creators and platforms, and what an incentive-first response to misinformation actually looks like.

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White Paper
In preparation

The Incentive Audit: a six-dimension diagnostic for the modern enterprise.

Framework, methodology, and findings from the first cohort of audited organizations.

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Case Study
Forthcoming

When the comp plan ran the company.

How a $400M incentive structure quietly redirected an entire firm's strategy for nine years.

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Industry Report
Q1

AI Incentive Misalignment: a sector-by-sector breakdown.

Where AI investment is compounding — and where it's quietly being undone by the human systems underneath.

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Executive Brief
Quarterly

The Future Incentives Index.

Twelve early-warning incentive signals every executive team should be tracking in 2026.

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