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A lot. I'd be surprised if any Business Management 101 class didn't teach that if there is a reward involved, people will maximize for whatever critera you meas
by ams6110 9y ago
A lot. I'd be surprised if any Business Management 101 class didn't teach that if there is a reward involved, people will maximize for whatever critera you measure.
- eli 9y agoGoodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- dragonwriter 9y agoThat's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.
- pmichaud 9y agoI agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.
- eli 9y agoWhat's an example of a metric that measures the true merit of something?
- Dylan16807 9y agoNo metric is perfect, but if you were measuring fat percentage in a moderately-accurate way it would be a very solid basis for an incentive.
- Johnny555 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect The term cobra effect originated in an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi.[3] The government therefore offered bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse
- tzs 9y agoWhat did the Delhi residents themselves think about cobras? Were the natives OK with cobras running around and it was just the British that wanted to reduce the population? I'm curious because if everybody disliked wild cobras loose in the city I'd have expected the breeders to kill their stock when the bounty ended, not free it.
- emodendroket 9y agoWhy would you expect that in a world where people dump hazardous waste into rivers to save money?
- tedunangst 9y agoBecause dehazarding waste is more difficult than chopping up a snake?
- emodendroket 9y agoBut letting the snakes go is even easier. Use the example of people littering instead of using a trash can, or not flushing public toilets, if you need a demonstration of how people can't be bothered with even simple tasks.
- kevin_nisbet 9y agoReminds me of one of my favourite stories about this: https://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-commissions.html?partner=fogcreek https://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-s...
- ryandrake 9y agoThis is probably true for all jobs and compensation schemes, but for some reason super true in Sales. Take a sales guy who failed middle school math, give him as complicated a salary/bonus structure as you can and overnight he will turn into Albert Einstein and optimize his behavior to produce the most money.