Poorly thought through government incentives: Vietnamese rats and Soviet glass production

Incentives can have unintended consequences, as demonstrated by examples from the Soviet Union and Vietnam. In the Soviet Union, glass production workers were initially paid based on the weight of the glass, resulting in excessively thick and heavy glass. To fix this, the payment system was changed to reward workers based on the size of the glass produced, leading to thin and fragile glass. Similar poor incentives exist in private businesses. The solution is to conduct A/B tests to determine the best incentives. An example is a study on Chilean bus drivers where different payment methods resulted in different driving behaviors.