On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.

Kerr, S. (1975). On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1975

DOI

10.5465/255378

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/255378

Cited from

economics_finance, organizational_management

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Goal Congruence (Alignment)
  • The most consequential alignment failures occur in multi-agent systems where individual rationality produces collective irrationality—the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, adverse-selection spirals—where unaligned incentives make globally optimal cooperation individually irrational
• Incentive
  • Absent this feedback into a deciding agent, the pattern is selection or reinforcement, not incentive. The proxy-attachment invariant. The payoff attaches to an observable proxy for the target; the population optimises the proxy, so proxy-gaming, crowding-out, and Goodhart drift are structural symptoms, not accidents.

    This sourceClassic catalogue of perverse incentives where payoff pinned to a measurable proxy rewards the wrong behavior — proxy-gaming, teaching-to-the-test, citation gaming.

Mechanisms

• Incentive Realignment
  • Its strength is that it removes the most stubborn kind of resistance — the rational kind — by making adoption locally sensible, and it exposes an uncomfortable truth many change efforts avoid: that the organization has been rewarding A while hoping for B.

    This sourceIncentive realignment is the deliberate correction of exactly that folly.

• Recognition System
  • Its central failure is misdirected reward — the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.

    This sourceA recognition system is exactly such a reward system, which is why its aim, not its sincerity, determines the norm it actually installs.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://doi.org/10.5465/255378 ×1

Registry ID ref:175969849438 · see in the full table