5 ms·
This Wikipedia page is the best piece on incentives of all time: "The term 'Cobra effect' stems from an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial In
by praptak 15y ago
This Wikipedia page is the best piece on incentives of all time:
"The term 'Cobra effect' stems from an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes. The Government therefore offered a reward for every dead snake. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually however the Indians began to breed cobras for the income.
When this was realized the reward was canceled, but the cobra breeders set the snakes free and the wild cobras consequently multiplied."
- sp332 15y agoI heard a version about an archeologist paying per-piece for shards of ancient pottery. So the locals broke the artifacts into little pieces to get more money!
- zipdog 15y agoI'd heard the version about the French paying a bounty for dead rats, both are great examples of how difficult it is to incentivize an behavior when all you can reward is a concrete outcome.
- gruseom 15y agoGreat story, but from the briefest of googlings, it seems poorly sourced. References to business literature are unreliable. Are there good historical sources for this? The story itself reminds me of John Gall's classic book on systems (originally Systemantics, now The Systems Bible).
- matt_s 15y agoSimilarly if you start measuring LOC (lines of code) on your developers and rewarding or penalizing as such. You are guaranteeing that the number of LOC increase. Same applies to things further up in the stack - # bugs fixed, # tickets closed, etc.
- Splines 15y agoAt our work we sometimes have unofficial rewards for reaching goals (e.g., as a team if we reach X number of bugs we get doughnuts). I joke with my co-workers that we should immediately stop finding bugs once we reach X, since anything further than that is wasted effort (and sets the bar higher when the next doughnut offer comes around).
- nradov 15y agoScott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) had a similar example of a company that paid its testers and developers a small bonus for each bug found and fixed. So of course the developers started intentionally coding bugs just so they could get paid for fixing them.
- pchristensen 15y agohttp://www.klocwork.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/dilbert-minivan-small.png http://www.klocwork.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/dilb...