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

Many bad examples

The far too long list of examples contains several that are fraud, rather than perverse incentives: for example, pretending that patients were mentally ill to get a bigger payment from the government. I am going to remove them. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Oppose - Calling things that are clearly good examples of perverse incentive bad examples or not perverse incentive is not helpful. See WP:UNRESPONSIVE and WP:CAUTIOUS and WP:RVREASONS. Kire1975 (talk) 19:28, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't see what the rationale is here. Obviously, many perverse incentives encourage people to do things that are useless or evil; that is what makes them perverse! jp×g 22:07, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

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)