## Cobra Effect During the British domination of India, the local government decided to fight the proliferation of cobras by offering cash rewards in exchange for dead ones, incentivizing people to kill them. This immediately started yielding results, before backfiring in the most spectacular way. People started breeding cobras, a much easier way to source dead cobras than to hunt wild ones. Learning about this, officials stopped the reward program at once. Upon this, cobra breeders were left with live cobras they couldn't kill and exchange for money anymore, so they released them from captivity into the cities, resulting in an overall increase of the cobra population, compared to what would have happened if the government had tried nothing. The historicity of this anecdote is, however, debated. Researchers have had difficulty matching it with historical documents. Nonetheless, this gave another name to *perverse incentives*, which are often referred to as the **cobra effect**. A more historically accurate occurence is the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (below). ## Great Hanoi Rat Massacre This occurrence is backed by historical documents (unearthed by Michael G. Vann), happened in Hanoï, Vietnam, then under the French government. To deal with the increasing population of rats, rewards were offered in exchange for rat tails. Soon enough, officials started noticing tailless rats around the city. Locals were catching them, cutting off their tails and releasing them into the sewers so they would reproduce and create more rats, and thus more tails. ## Twitch ASMR Twitch discovered that blindly promoting the content generating the most interactions led to the proliferation of *mature* content and the degradation of the platform over time which would in turn undermine overall usage. This would have degraded the quality of the platform over time as well as overall usage in the process. In response to the somewhat equivocal content published by ASMR streamers, they resorted to banning them. This is an interesting example because the perverse incentive worked both ways, the streamers were rewarded for creating content misaligned with the platform *and* the platform was rewarded by getting more usage from it.