Coercion, Incentives & Intervention

Primes about deliberately shaping another agent's behavior or a system's causal trajectory: coercive tactics such as deterrence, compellence, and brinkmanship, incentive design, and the side effects of intervening, including moral hazard and harms coupled to the same channel as the benefit.

8 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Brinkmanship — Deliberately raising a stochastic risk of shared catastrophe, using the rising probability as a bargaining lever.
• Coercion — Shaping another agent's choice by manipulating the costs and threats attached to their options, so the agent itself 'chooses' the coercer's preferred action — the common parent of forcing an action (compellence) and forcing restraint (deterrence).
• Compellence — Imposing ongoing costs to force a positive action and keeping them live until compliance — the action-demanding counterpart to deterrence, structurally harder because compliance is publicly visible and deadline-bound.
• Deterrence — Preventing an action not by blocking it but by arranging consequences so the target's own cost-benefit calculation makes the action unattractive.
• Incentive — A deliberately placed payoff signal attached to a behavior at a leverage point.
• Intervention — Externally fixing a variable's value, severing its normal upstream causes while retaining its downstream effects.
• Intervention-Coupled Harm — A beneficial intervention produces its harm through the same causal channel that produces its benefit, so the two cannot be tuned apart.
• Moral Hazard — Risk-taking under protection.