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
The deliberate design of reward structures to produce specific behaviors.
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.