Of interest: Glen Whitman's post on incentives

I think this post is highly interesting. Reason: a basic assumption of microeconomics is that people (economists call them 'economic agents') are motivated by incentives. Common sense, no? Whitman was outlining the point that incentives might not work in the way in which we might predict, because economic agents aren't robots basically - they are tempted to cheat, to evade the law, etc, so these need to be accounted for when introducing incentives.

Have a read here.