Seth's Blog : Bent incentives

Bent incentives

Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me?

A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she’s calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I’ve never interacted, I block each number, but the calls keep coming.

AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don’t have an incentive to do so.

At the same time, many subscribers to this blog don’t receive their emails because Google has a clear incentive to move the emails to the promotions folder. Google benefits by forcing marketers and writers to pay them for access to folks’ attention.

Merged medical practices have an incentive to charge patients more, push doctors to work even more unreasonable hours and cut corners on medical outcomes.

Instagram has an incentive to make people feel as though they’re falling behind unless they adhere to the algorithm. And Amazon has an incentive to denature the business model of most of their merchants by charging for advertising, even though they know the ads serve neither merchants nor customers.

Tim Wu is our best explainer of how, without boundaries, networks always spiral out of control. His new book is twenty years too late or exactly what we need right now.

But we don’t need any more Nicole Bennet, thanks.