the cobra effect

Greetings to all the PH community, on this occasion I want to share with you a story that is supposed to have happened in India in the 19th century, the source is not verified but from this story the term "cobra effect" was coined, I hope you like it and can leave a valuable comment.

The story goes that in India during the British occupation in the 19th century, a ruler of the city of Delhi came up with the idea of using bounties to encourage people to hunt cobras to reduce the population of cobras that were considered a pest.

The idea seemed like a stroke of genius because if the state paid the farmers for every cobra killed, there would be more hunters wanting to kill these animals, according to the ruler's logic with the reward there would be more eyes looking for cobras to hunt and he as the ruler would only have to pay the hunter for every dead cobra he showed.

This plan benefited the state as this way of reducing the snake population would cost less money and resources than setting up an army squadron to do the job, so far so good, many people were bringing in dead snakes and being paid for their work

One day the soldiers discovered that the inhabitants of that city, seeing how easy it was to get the money, were raising snakes in their houses and then killing them to collect the reward, the ruler, knowing what was going on, ordered the elimination of the payment to the villagers for the dead cobras.

The citizens, seeing that they would no longer be paid for killing snakes, let the cobras go free and now the city had a more serious problem, as the number of snakes increased disproportionately, this phenomenon of giving rewards and aggravating a problem would be called "the cobra effect".

A cobra effect is when you create an incentive scheme to solve a problem and you end up making the problem you wanted to solve worse, although this story can be false, hence the cool name "the cobra effect".

In my opinion, reward schemes are so effective that they often end up incentivising people to find the trap and benefit by doing little and gaining a lot, regardless of the impressive damage their actions cause.

It should be noted that although there is no record of it being true, there is record of a similar situation in Vietnam, only instead of English rulers they were French and instead of snakes the French paid for dead rats, the results were the same over time the farmers bred the rats and then killed them to collect the reward, when the rulers discovered what they were doing the farmers stopped paying and in revenge the farmers released the rats causing the rat population to increase.

in conclusion for people who are setting up a business and want to reward their workers or customers you have to take into account that people will seek to collect the incentive by doing as little work as possible, this way of acting of human beings is something that is deep inside. So when planning your reward system you had better first carefully study the "cobra effect" because you may end up with no money and bigger problems than you had at the beginning of implementing your reward scheme.

created by :@trabajosdelsiglo