The Tyranny of Metrics¶
Muller, J. Z. (2018). The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Evolutionary Trap
- Institutional and metric-driven systems — hospitals optimizing patient satisfaction at the expense of clinical outcomes, or rankings driven by inputs that once tracked quality but are now gameable.
This sourceCase studies (health care, education, policing) of institutions optimizing gameable proxy metrics — e.g. patient satisfaction or rankings — at the expense of the substantive outcomes the metrics once tracked.
- Institutional and metric-driven systems — hospitals optimizing patient satisfaction at the expense of clinical outcomes, or rankings driven by inputs that once tracked quality but are now gameable.
Mechanisms¶
- Leading Indicator Dashboard
- Its failure mode is that leading indicators are the most gameable signals on any board: because acting on them is rewarded, people optimize the indicator instead of the outcome
This sourceDescribes goal displacement in which people optimize the measured indicator rather than the underlying outcome.
- Its failure mode is that leading indicators are the most gameable signals on any board: because acting on them is rewarded, people optimize the indicator instead of the outcome
- Problem-First Intake Template
- A "success" field can also quietly become a place to record the metric that is easiest to measure rather than the outcome that matters — the McNamara fallacy in miniature, where the quantifiable crowds out the real
This sourceDescribes the McNamara fallacy as privileging what is quantifiable over outcomes that matter.
- A "success" field can also quietly become a place to record the metric that is easiest to measure rather than the outcome that matters — the McNamara fallacy in miniature, where the quantifiable crowds out the real
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc7743t ×1
- https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174952/the-tyranny-of-metrics ×1
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