Coercive Leverage & Incentive Distortion

Primes about how one party shapes another's choices through cost and incentive design: coercive leverage (coercion, compellence, deterrence, conditional access), and distortions that arise when incentives or signals are misaligned (moral hazard, signal inflation, proxy-target fidelity, severed accountability).

13 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.

• 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.
• Conditional Access — A controller couples a desired item with an undesired one, leveraging access asymmetry to force acceptance of both.
• 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.
• Loss Aversion — Losses felt stronger than gains.
• Moral Hazard — Risk-taking under protection.
• Proxy–Target Fidelity — How faithfully an observable proxy tracks the unobservable target it stands in for — the degree to which acting on, optimizing, or inferring from the proxy is acting on the target itself.
• Relationship Specific Investment — Resources spent to build an asset whose value is highest inside one specific relationship and drops sharply outside it, creating asymmetric hold-up exposure.
• Risk Aversion — Preference for certainty.
• Risk Transfer — Shifting an adverse-outcome distribution from one party to another for a price, so the loss lands on whoever can bear it best.
• Severed Accountability Via Unearned Revenue — When an agent's revenue arrives through a channel that bypasses the principals it would otherwise answer to, the accountability link is severed and predictable goal-drift follows.
• Signal Inflation — A sender over-fires a channel and depletes a finite, slow-regenerating receiver-side credibility budget, so the next true message lands on an audience that has rationally stopped responding.