Incentive Architecture

A bonus post is coming Wednesday, June 10. Here's why it couldn't wait.

Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit and watched redemption climb from 44 percent to 97, which is the part that worked. Wednesday's bonus post is about what a deposit pays for when nobody says which bottles count.

A reader sent me a case.

Jim McDonough lives in Connecticut. He recognized the pattern unfolding in his own backyard and took the time to bring it here. That is precisely the kind of observation this newsletter exists to surface. Thank you, Jim.

In 2024, Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit from five cents to ten. The goal: higher recycling rates. By the end of 2025, the statewide redemption rate had gone from 44 percent to 97 percent.

That part worked.

What the designers never wrote down — who exactly got to respond — is what makes it a BFR case.

Wednesday, June 10.

—Wayne

Behavior Follows Rewards — Post 15: Why Subtraction Is the Hardest Strategic Act

Post 15 — Apple Almost Never Says It Removed Anything

This is the final issue of Behavior Follows Rewards. It is about why organizations tend to reward what gets added and rarely reward what gets taken away, with Apple as the example.

Post 14 — What the First Posts Prove — And What's Still Ahead

Charlie Munger studied incentives all his life and still said he had underestimated them. Sixteen posts in, the same mechanism has run through a bank, a heat subsidy, a welfare transfer and a national health service. Here is what those cases establish — and what is still ahead.

Post 13 — Four Hours

England set a four-hour clock on emergency care and paid hospitals for meeting it. Patients were moved to short-stay units because the transfer stopped the clock, ambulances were held outside, and completed cases spiked in the last twenty minutes. Compliance reached 97.7 percent.

Post 12 — Three Years. Nine Figures. No Deal.

Three years, a reported nine-figure signature, and a golf league most people said could not be built. Everything the 2021 announcement described as the work, Greg Norman delivered. The league still needed something nobody had asked him for in public.

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Post 15 — Apple Almost Never Says It Removed Anything

Post 14 — What the First Posts Prove — And What's Still Ahead

Post 13 — Four Hours

Post 12 — Three Years. Nine Figures. No Deal.