Structural Incentive

Structural incentive refers to the way a system's rules, protocols, and interaction architectures shape the payoffs available to individual agents — and thus the behaviors that emerge as equilibria. It is not about changing what agents want; it is about changing what agents can gain by acting on what they want. Mechanism design is the formal study of structural incentives, but the concept applies broadly to institutions, markets, and multi-agent AI systems.

The insight is that misalignment is rarely a character flaw of agents and almost always a design flaw of structures. When a system with a high price of anarchy produces miserable outcomes, the agents are not defective; the game is. The alignment problem is therefore not a problem of moral education but of incentive engineering.

A structural incentive perspective on AI alignment asks not "how do we make the model want the right thing?" but "what interaction protocol makes the right thing the thing every model gains from doing?" This reframing treats alignment as a problem in game theory rather than in moral psychology.