In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson describes a situation in which paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald accidentally created perverse incentives on an expedition: Koenigswald’s discoveries might have been more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.
