[skybrian]

At a high level, the market is supposed to provide an incentive to serve customers - "solving a problem" or "help people" as the original post put it.

My point is that real-world incentives are never perfectly aligned with such lofty, nebulous goals. They are about things you can measure such as how much money you can make. Making money is not the same as helping people and no incentive scheme is clever enough to make it so. Customers are often smarter than rules but even then, customers can be fooled. So there will always a way to make money without helping people and when you increase incentives, it also increases incentive to do things that aren't actually the goal.

This means that to some extent we rely on people to follow the spirit of the incentives and not to simply be amoral incentive-maximizers.

(This is closely related to the principal-agent problem, except the principal here is society in general.)

[kbenson]

> At a high level, the market is supposed to provide an incentive to serve customers

That's not what markets do. Markets are a means of efficiently and accurately pricing things in a responsive way. Some markets don't even have customers. That price may or may not be money, depending on the market in question.

> My point is that real-world incentives are never perfectly aligned with such lofty, nebulous goals.

For markets, definitely not, since that's not really what they are for, and any created incentive will at best attempt to move a market towards that.

> Making money is not the same as helping people and no incentive scheme is clever enough to make it so. Customers are often smarter than rules but even then, customers can be fooled. So there will always a way to make money without helping people and when you increase incentives, it also increases incentive to do things that aren't actually the goal.

Nobody here has said it is. The original comment noted "People acting in their own interest are reliable." I interpreted that to mean "when there are forces urging a person or group to act a certain way for their own self interest, it's easier to rely on them to continue acting that way". If Microsoft benefits from doing something that benefits others, it's easier to rely on them to continue doing that. I'm still not sure what point you were trying to make from that, since I'm not following how your latest comment relates to that or to my call for clarification, since I thought maybe you were interpreting the statement somewhat differently than I was.

[skybrian]

My point is that "Microsoft benefits from doing something that benefits others" is never going to be entirely true, or at least not for long.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

Autodesk benefits from providing students CAD software in school so that they use it in the workplace. This benefits the students, who no longer have to buy a license during college, and benefits them (Autodesk) by making sure they have a "captive market". Gaming the system? Yes- it plays to the needs of poor college students, who then are comfortable with their development environment and don't want to learn another thing, too.

As long as Autodesk is providing this program, students are:

A) not pirating their software,

B) becoming used to their tools (being completely unfamiliar with CAD as an engineer is a bad start), and

C) starting in the Autodesk ecosystem.

As long as students keep using Autodesk's platform, Autodesk is:

A) strengthening its market share

B) able to continue development (because the now-working previously students are using their software)

C) Relevant in the college setting, where professors have a large say in what goes and what doesn't.

There are probably always going to be college students, there are probably always going to be engineering jobs, and engineers will always need to have a CAD package. As long as those two things exist, Autodesk (or any other company with a CAD package) can gain goodwill, ensure relevancy, and invest in their future by giving their software away for free now. This is "gaming" a market in a long-term symbiotic manner.

Full disclosure: I'm an engineering student, in high school, and really appreciate the free copies of Autodesk Inventor and Dassault Systemes' Solidworks that I've gotten.