Incentives are one of those things everyone knows we need, but nobody can design safely. A bit like security, we often come across systems that can be gamed due

Incentives are one of those things everyone knows we need, but nobody can design safely. A bit like security, we often come across systems that can be gamed due to unforeseen issues with the design. Google "Hanoi rats" for an incentive blowup. Then there's myriad other incentive issues related to taxes and subsidies, all stuff that had the good intention of promoting good things and reducing bad things. Sometimes its a meta-game: if a team sees a "share the spoils" scheme being trialled with another team, maybe they shouldn't fix their issues until there's a scheme in place for their team? What about the shape of the payoff? If you fix two issues in the same period, are you better off or worse off than splitting them over a boundary? Even in sports, there's issues: there's an incentive payment to break the world record. Say you can pole vault 10cm higher than the previous record in your practices. But why break it once when you can break it 10 times? I read about this some time ago, should be findable online.