Is it an incentives problem, since Peterson may not be reaping much in terms of rewards relative to the value of his contribution?
Peterson is the CEO of a logistics company that suffered due to the pandemic, so while he can’t capture all or most of the rewards here, he and his company should certainly benefit at least to some extent from getting this problem fixed. (As an analogy, Stripe’s lofty mission statement of “growing the GDP of the internet” comes to mind.) Possibly the benefits even outweigh the opportunity cost of how else he could’ve spent this time as CEO, though not if we assume a low prior probability of success.
Ideally he’d benefit much more from this action, to incentivize repeat performances, but at least it’s not necessarily a pure tragedy of the commons where each individual would have been incentivized to defect by ignoring the problem.
It does seem like problems need to at least approach the level of ‘this is worth solving for me simply to get my private benefits’ in order to get solved, but I also think that the fruit is often low hanging enough that this is fine?
Peterson is the CEO of a logistics company that suffered due to the pandemic, so while he can’t capture all or most of the rewards here, he and his company should certainly benefit at least to some extent from getting this problem fixed. (As an analogy, Stripe’s lofty mission statement of “growing the GDP of the internet” comes to mind.) Possibly the benefits even outweigh the opportunity cost of how else he could’ve spent this time as CEO, though not if we assume a low prior probability of success.
Ideally he’d benefit much more from this action, to incentivize repeat performances, but at least it’s not necessarily a pure tragedy of the commons where each individual would have been incentivized to defect by ignoring the problem.
It does seem like problems need to at least approach the level of ‘this is worth solving for me simply to get my private benefits’ in order to get solved, but I also think that the fruit is often low hanging enough that this is fine?