But the most difficult job in redesigning incentives may be the business-world equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm. It is surprisingly easy to unintentionally create perverse incentives. Here’s an example from a slightly different context. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered by Bedouin shepherds in a desert cave near the Dead Sea in modern-day Israel, archaeologists offered to pay the shepherds for each new scrap they found. That encouraged the shepherds to rip any scrolls they found into tiny scraps. The archaeologists had the right idea in theory but didn’t think
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