Incentives at large companies can be weird. I once had a situation where a vendor put in an estimate of close to $100K to, in effect, generate a 40 page PDF fo

Incentives at large companies can be weird. I once had a situation where a vendor put in an estimate of close to $100K to, in effect, generate a 40 page PDF for us. I pushed back until they came back with a still high but less outrageous proposal. Upon looking back, I realized that if I had approved the original request nothing bad would have happened. No one, other than myself, was going to look at the bill. The amount involved was a rounding error of a rounding error of that week's revenue. In fact, the only one that got hurt was my team as the work got delayed while we went back and forth on the proposal. The incentives in this case were set up so that the rational course of action for a manager is to be less frugal or responsible with company funds.