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.
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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.
Post 11 — The League That Rewarded Losing
In 1984, NBA Commissioner David Stern announced a fix for tanking. Teams found a way to game it. The NBA has rewritten the rule four times since, and teams gamed every version that has been played. The newest takes effect next season.
Post 10 — Same Farmers. Same Land. Two Years Apart.
In 1988 Vietnam appealed for emergency food aid. In 1989 it exported 1.4 million tonnes of rice and stood third in the world. Resolution 10 had given farm households fifteen-year land contracts and let them keep and sell everything above a threshold.
Post 9 — The Poppy Problem
Britain offered Afghan farmers money to destroy their poppy crops. The reward created a reason to grow more. Everything that followed made it worse.
Post 8 — You Get the Cash
Brazil wanted children in school. It paid families when they went. The children went. This is what a reward structure looks like when the incentive and the outcome point in the same direction.
Post 7 — "People Would Not Do This"
What do you call it when the system works exactly as designed?
Post 6 — Eight Is Great
Eight products per household was the target. Branch staff were measured on accounts opened, tracked daily, with bonuses for hitting the number. Two million accounts were opened that nobody had asked for.
Post 5 — Sink or Swim Together
Every year, Amex’s senior executives arrived at bonus season prepared to compete — for capital, recognition, a bigger share. They competed hard. The competition was with each other.
Post 4 — Eddie Lampert Knew Exactly How Free Markets Work
Eddie Lampert believed free markets make companies efficient. So he built one inside Sears — 30 autonomous business units, each competing for the same resources, each with its own P&L. He was right that it would work. He was wrong about what “working” would produce.
Incentive Architecture
Post 3 — Playing to Lose
On a July night in London, spectators watched Olympic athletes serve into the net on purpose. Eight players were disqualified for it. The tournament format had made losing the rational thing to do.
Incentive Architecture
Bonus Post — A Bottle Is a Bottle
Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit to lift a falling redemption rate. The rate rose. So did the number of containers arriving from states that had never paid the deposit.
Incentive Architecture
Post 2 — How to Win a Lawsuit and Lose a Sport
The Attorneys General won the fight for transfer freedom. NIL rights had already opened the door. Nobody anticipated what the reward structure would do next.
Incentive Architecture
Bonus Post — What's Your Target?
For the second year running, every finalist in both draws of the world squash championship came from one country. Egypt does not import talent or outspend its rivals. It built a structure that answers one question.
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.
Incentive Architecture
Post 1 — When the Metric Became the Mission
Duolingo sells a streak freeze: pay a fee and your daily streak survives a day you did not study. The reward keeps running, the learning stops. Then the company applied the same logic to itself.
Incentive Architecture
A bonus post is coming Wednesday. Here's why it couldn't wait.
An eighteen-year-old from Egypt beat the eight-time champion in Giza to take the world squash title, and Egyptian players filled both finals. Wednesday's bonus post is about the structure that keeps producing them.
Incentive Architecture
Post 0 — What do Wells Fargo, a UK heat program, and Israeli daycares have in common?
A bank, a heat subsidy and a group of Israeli daycares have almost nothing in common. Each built a system to change behavior. Each got precisely what it rewarded, and none of them got what they wanted.
Incentive Architecture
Start here.
Behavior Follows Rewards takes one real institutional decision each Saturday and shows how its reward structure produced the behavior nobody intended. This page explains the idea the whole publication rests on, and where to begin reading.