the cobra effect
expressionops culturegovernance & risk
An incentive that worsens the problem it was meant to solve, named for a colonial bounty on cobras that created cobra farms.
The story runs that British Delhi paid per dead cobra, enterprising residents bred them, and cancelling the bounty released the stock, leaving more cobras than before; the tale's documentation is thin but the mechanism is everywhere. Pay per bug found and bugs get planted; reward closed tickets and tickets get split; bounty vulnerabilities carelessly and you fund a gray market. It is Goodhart's law with fangs: the measure did not just decouple from the goal, it attacked it.