[silencethendang]

I know aligning incentives is usually something that falls under the broad category of "management" or people skills in a company, but there's a subfield of economics that studies exactly how to do this in a structured way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design). It's usually applied to things like auctions, but I've always thought applying incentive alignment in a systematic way (in which, for instance, middle management submits "bids" for metrics that they want to track and for headcount) could be a viable way to run things. Any thoughts on something like this?

[ethanbond]

Whoa, I’ve never come across Mechanism Design specifically, though I did dabble in some research (and application in pharmaceutical R&D software) of market/auction design. I found that stuff to be profoundly useful, so I’ll definitely dive into mechanism design.

Have you found any particularly good resources/books on this?

FWIW I loved Alvin Roth’s “Who gets what and why” which is about market design mostly.

[silencethendang]

Sorry for the late reply. I've never heard of the Al Roth book, but seems interesting. I'll check it out. I mostly became familiar with Mechanism Design when I took the first year microeconomics sequence in graduate school (basically one of the few departments this stuff is covered academically is in Economics). So my best reference that I can vouch for is, unfortunately, probably this: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/microeconomic-theory-978...

There's also Matthew Jackson's book which might be better. I've read his class notes for other topics and I think he does a good job explaining: https://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/mechtheo.pdf