Perverse Incentives Quotes

I think that if you have a single payer system and an opt-out for people who want to pay more [for better service, etc.], I think it would be better - and I think we'll eventually get there. It wouldn't be better at the top - [our current system] is the best in the world at the top. But the waste in the present system is awesome and we do get some very perverse incentives.

Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

As long as perverse compensation systems for financial executives exist, the United States financial problems will remain nearly, if not completely, intractable.

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.

You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I'm really against that. You have an incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

Our electoral process has created perverse incentives that have warped our democracy and empowered special interests and a vocal minority.

As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and are self-serving.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.

In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

It's the nature of government, to build enduring institutions, structures that stay long after their purpose is over. If you pay people to help the poor, you have people who won't be paid if there aren't any poor, so they'll be sure to find some.

A risk-insensitive leverage ratio can be a useful backstop to risk-based capital requirements. But such a ratio can have perverse incentives if it is the binding capital requirement because it treats relatively safe activities, such as central clearing, as equivalent to the most risky activities.