I think a lot about the importance of incentives. There are numerous historical examples of perverse incentives but what are some examples of times where people got the incentives right?

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antanaclasis

60

I’d say a lot of domains have reasonably-aligned incentives a lot of the time, but that’s a boring non-answer. For a specific example, there’s the classic case of how whenever I go to the grocery store, I’m presented with a panoply of cheap, good quality foodstuffs available for me to purchase. The incentives along the chain from production -> store -> me are reasonably well-aligned.

Yes, I agree that a grocery store is a great example. I suppose I'm looking for examples where people recognized a problem, changed the incentives, and then it fixed/improved things.

Dagon

30

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax is likely a good example - if implemented well, the incentive effect scales precisely with remediating the harm caused.

Yes, I think Pigovian taxes are really interesting and useful. I suppose then I'm looking for examples of privately implemented Pigovian taxes that fixed a problem successfully.

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Typo in the title.

I edited it