The “cobra effect” occurs when a solution actually worsens the problem it is trying to solve. Named for a bounty program that went awry in colonial India, there are many examples of incentives leading to more of the very thing that should be reduced. Interestingly, when you search, the other top examples all concern animals — an attempt to decrease the rat population in colonial Hanoi, Vietnam and an attempt to reduce the number of feral pigs in Georgia. This is strange because these animal-related problems all contain the solution within themselves.
If you read about these examples, you’ll learn a bit (and often just a bit) about the history of each time and place. But what you won’t read is how these incentives could have been aligned with their intended outcomes. In this post, I’m going to propose some changes that the makers of these incentives could have used so that they might have actually gotten the desired outcomes. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)”