Why public rankings breed behaviour nobody rewards directly
A visible ranking creates incentives the designer never intended, because participants optimise for the metric that determines their position, not the goal behind it.
Intuition test — answer before you read on
Why do public rankings produce unintended behaviours like citation rings?
A university ranked its departments by research citations. Within two years, professors were citing each other’s papers in circles, splitting single studies into multiple publications, and avoiding interdisciplinary work that would dilute their department’s count. Citation rates climbed; intellectual risk declined.
What everyone sees
Public rankings are expected to surface the best and motivate the rest. The metric is chosen because it correlates with quality, and making it visible is supposed to amplify that correlation. The assumption is that what gets measured gets improved.
What is actually happening
Kerr’s classic paper on “the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B” describes how organisations routinely incentivise the measurable proxy while hoping for the unmeasurable goal. Muller’s “The Tyranny of Metrics” documents the same pattern across hospitals, schools, and police departments: the ranking optimises the number it displays and produces side-effects — citation rings, teaching-to-the-test, crime reclassification — that nobody planned and nobody rewards directly.
Why it stays hidden
The side-effects hide because they improve the metric. A citation ring raises the department’s ranking, so it never appears as a problem in the data the ranking itself displays. The system’s success criterion conceals its own corruption.
A ranking rewards the metric, and the metric attracts behaviours the designer never intended — which the metric then counts as success.
A ranking rewards the metric, and the metric attracts behaviours the designer never intended — which the metric then counts as success.
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A ranking rewards the metric, and the metric attracts behaviours the designer never intended — which the metric then counts as success.
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Sources & further reading 2
- Kerr — On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B
- Muller — The tyranny of metrics
Cross-references
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