The Incentive Design Manifesto: Engineering Our Nature

Our incentive structures, which shape our beliefs, identities, and behaviors, are up to us.

The Institution for Mechanism Design is an attempt to reclaim an essential generator of our lives: incentives. Those economic puppet strings that, despite our most heroic efforts, guide our every thought and become embedding in our every instinct. There is a higher conception of self-control at hand - control over the nature of self, which means control over your context and your training experience. The institute for mechanism design is about the meta-control which makes it all possible. It is constructing new steering wheels to parts of our nature that we scarcely realized could be controlled.

Mechanisms dominate, and for good reason. Every paycheck, every grade, every deadline, every vote, every offer letter, every marriage is grounded in a mechanistic invention. The serve all kinds of purpose: from the evaluation of the quality of people & work to the efficient channeling of massively collective resources. They allow for the scaling of ideas into industries, where competitive mechanisms within and outside of organizations direct flows of capital and attention. Silicon Valley was built on the back of incentive structures in computational systems.

These examples demonstrate that mechanistic brilliance can turn the incentive environment that drives our every thought, keystroke and action into a tool that we control. And it is exactly this mechanistic creativity which we bottle at the Institute for Mechanism Design.