By Carl Coates
December 3, 2025 – Incentives matter, especially if you want fewer snakes and more optimal high school seniors.
There’s a story of dubious authenticity from 19th century India about cobras. The story goes that the cobra population was causing an unduly large number of deaths in Delhi, India. The British Raj that ruled India at the time offered a bounty for every dead cobra that was brought in. At first, the bounty worked. Large numbers of snakes were brought in and exchanged for the reward. But, then a funny thing happened. The number of cobras did not decrease. People began to breed cobras in order to earn the bounty. The Raj got wise to these efforts and ended the bounty program leading to an unleashing of cobras across the city.
The British Raj had created a perverse incentive system and in their efforts to decrease the cobras had actually helped increase the cobra population.
Stories like this abound: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 involved turning in rat tails for a money bounty as opposed to the whole animal. So Hanoians cut off tails and let the rats go to breed…more tails. The Fort Benning, Georgia feral pig roundup of 2007-2008 also asked that hunters turn in tails, many of which were purchased at local butchers. Per acre payments for “destruction” of the opium crop in Afghanistan in 2002 increased acreage of opium plantings in order to destroy more and get more payments. Of note, some of the crop was processed and slipped through the cracks to drug dealers. One wonders what price was offered relative to the destruction bounty.
Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) jumped into the fray when he wrote humorously of a similar program that his wife unintentionally started:
Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. … Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
Incentives are powerful tools. They shape behavior, drive performance, and influence outcomes. But when they’re poorly designed or misaligned with actual goals or desired outcomes, they can lead to unintended—and often disastrous—consequences. Understanding this concept is crucial for leaders, educators, policymakers, or anyone trying to influence their own behaviors or the behaviors of others!
Senioritis as a Misaligned Incentive
Schools are not immune to perverse incentives. The 2009 Atlanta Public School system cheating scandal stands out at a shocking level. Though not on the level with the standardized test scandal, another example of misaligned incentives worth some analysis is “senioritis,” that high school tradition where seniors start to lose interest in school after they learn the outcome of their college applications, perhaps even after they’ve hit the send button on those applications. But, examine senioritis through an economic lens and what you see is a system design challenge, not just student apathy. Formal incentives like grades, GPAs, and test scores drive students’ effort primarily until college applications are submitted. After acceptance, these rewards lose value, and motivation plummets.
Dates for Applications and Acceptance to College for 50 Universities
A look at 50 top and mid-tier university application and acceptance dates shows a striking pattern: deadlines fall in winter, and most acceptances arrive in late March and early April. After that point, many students realize their hard work has already paid off, and engagement in class sharply drops. One can imagine data of seniors’ engagement and attendance strongly correlating with the application and acceptance dates shown above.
Though frustrating for teachers, seniors’ behavior is not irrational if one considers that students are simply optimizing their outcomes. For years, external measures were the path to opportunity for students. Once those incentives disappear, effort and engagement takes a back seat to independence, social life, and personal interests. Coursework becomes less urgent when futures are already decided. Moreover, the cost of further effort outweighs the perceived benefits.
Knowing what is important to seniors might help us understand them better. These young people didn’t just suddenly slump into apathy towards their education. Most students have never been in a position where they can coast. There is surely something liberating about feeling like your next steps are set. Placing those same expectations we had for students back in September are no longer realistic. Some high schools respond by tying event attendance or prom eligibility to academic effort, and some colleges check final transcripts before confirming admissions. But the underlying disconnect remains: student motivation is highest when incentives are aligned with meaningful outcomes.
To reduce “senioritis” in economics class, finding authentic challenges that expose students to new ideas could provide that inspiration to get them over the line. Anyone who has taught AP or IB courses and has found themselves in a bind trying to keep students on track between the test date and graduation knows that you need to build a better mousetrap.
There’s more students can learn from economics than the typical curriculum provides. Consider how an economic lens can be used to understand societal problems in addition to potential solutions. How do field experiments in economics and behavioral economics help students better understand human behavior in a variety of contexts? Can students design an experiment to get more people to donate to school clubs? What can economics tell us about gender disparities in society and the workplace?
Exploring these ideas through such methods as the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) along with opportunities for Structured Academic Controversies (source material here and here) can help deepen students’ understanding of complex issues, reinforce critical thinking skills, encourage perspective-taking and promote evidence-based reasoning. This brief IDM has students engage with economics of the environment that includes opportunities for agency and genuine discussion.
Whether battling cobras, rats, or disengaged seniors, the lesson is the same: people optimize according to the incentives set before them. The real challenge isn’t getting students to change their behavior given the incentives they face, but to design smarter incentives, so the behaviors we want are the ones people choose. The assertion here is that even after post-high school paths have been established, tapping into that natural curiosity can reinvigorate seniors to finish strong.
In the end, incentives matter—so let’s be sure we’re encouraging fewer snakes and more engaged, inspired seniors.
Resources
- For everyone: watch the E4E Optimization video
- For educators: Register and log-in as an educator to the E4E educator hub on the website to access the optimization lesson plan which includes activities featuring:
- Making choices- Understanding opportunity costs and trade-offs
- Case Study- Best strategy to study for multiple exams
- Sunk Cost Fallacy