Cobra Effect
Horst Siebert · 2001
"A well-intended incentive can produce exactly what it was meant to prevent."
The British in colonial Delhi paid a bounty for dead cobras to reduce cobra populations. People started breeding cobras. When the government cancelled the program, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes — and the cobra population increased. The name stuck.
The Cobra Effect is what Goodhart's Law feels like when the incentive is loud. Any rule that pays for outcome X creates a market to produce X, including by cheating. Designers of incentives must model not just intended actors but adversarial ones — the smartest people looking at the rule will find the gap. If the gap flips the sign of the incentive, you get a cobra farm.
A city pays residents per pound of trash collected. What's the likely cobra outcome?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- The Cobra Effect — perverse incentivesWikipedia
The French Garden and the English Garden
"New systems are usually built like French formal gardens — a geometry imposed from above that flattens whatever was already there — when they could instead be built like English landscape gardens, which study the existing terrain and work with what's already load-bearing."