It's funny, you actually see this broken incentive system everywhere once you start looking for it. Here's a quick example from outside the business world.
I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.
Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.
Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.
(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)
I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.
Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.
Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.
(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)