Talk:Perverse incentive

Cleaning up a bit

Deleted the bit about forum shopping, because that's an unintended consequence, not a perverse incentive. (Unless a forum became friendly in order to handle fewer cases, but that doesn't make any sense at all.) I also deleted some unnecessary conjecture from the abortion bit that was mostly unrelated to the main point.— Preceding unsigned comment added by GrandOpener (talk • contribs) 10:32, 18 February 2011‎

Stories need to be reviewed

Have the stories listed here been fact-checked? The story behind the cobra effect is probably untrue: https://nitter.net/salonium/status/1696500231645368331#m

Major example skipped

In the 1950's , Mao decided that sparrows had to be killed as to protect the crops from the birds eating the grain. After billions of sparrows were killed, locusts had no more natural predator so they ate most of the crops leading to 50 to 100 million of dead Chinese. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2F05:F20C:E400:D92:F2CC:E5F0:7828 (talk) 12:19, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

This makes me wonder how many of these stories have been embellished, invented etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.42.115.159 (talk) 15:00, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Rio de Janeiro scorpion bounty

I believe it was in a 1970s Reader's Digest, about scorpion breeding in the favelas as a response to a city government bounty campaign. I can't find a reference with today's search engines, nor to several other stories I remember from RD.Makes me feel as if I had invented those... Once Google can't find something, it's like it never existed... YamaPlos talk 23:40, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Czechoslovakian chandeliers

This was told by my dad, who happened to work in the central planification ministry during early socialist Czechoslovakia (until he managed to escape).

Czechoslovakian crystal glass is famous worldwide, and thus chandeliers were produced, for export to get foreign currency. Problem is, there is a limited market for luxury chandeliers, which are purchased by the unit, some of them bespoke, all of them handmade, certainly not from one single design. Thus, worker productivity (very important in socialist countries, for any kind of bonus) cannot be measured by the unit, so let's measure the total weight produced... As a result, Czech crystal chandeliers grew to be so heavy, that clients were having engineering issues when trying to install those. YamaPlos talk 23:50, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Electoral Systems examples seem a bit unrelated

I am not so sure that nonmonotonicity in social choice rules is really the same kind of "perverse incentive" as the term is used throughout the article. Yes, in the most literal sense, nonmonotonic voting rules may present situations where a voter is incentivized to, shall we say, pervert their true preference order. However every other example on this page, including the lead, is about situations where authority figures set up an explicit incentive structure that achieved explicitly, and in majority, the opposite outcome.

In the case of the voting rule, the incentive structure set up is "if you vote, your preferred candidates will be elected" and for the most part this is true, even in nonmonotonic rules. the failure modes are relatively rare and almost always extremely hard to predict.

I propose this section be removed (particularly as it was added without discussion). Affinepplan (talk) 16:57, 7 November 2024 (UTC)