There's no denying that incentives matter, but the key difference between the regulations they tried and the financial incentive they finally adopted is account

There's no denying that incentives matter, but the key difference between the regulations they tried and the financial incentive they finally adopted is accountability. It was easy to hold the captain of a ship accountable for the number of prisoners who walked off a ship in good health, and impossible to enforce regulations about what should happen on the ship itself. The fact that they tied that accountability to a financial incentive is a red herring. They could have just as easily tied it to a regulatory penalty, with similar results. It's depressing that a professor is using such sophistry to justify his existence to his students.