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This makes me think about why new more accountable systems between companies sometimes fail in implementation. Sometimes the existing players are happy with the exploitable gaps in the existing system.

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Great comment. Fun theory -- companies function on personal optics internally.

When you sell software, you can get buy in easily if they can say "this'll make me look excellent to my boss" (and they have decision-making power/budget of course). Similarly, a boss will promote subordinates who will make him/her look better.

Put another way, the incentives facing any single component of a greater whole does not always align with the incentives of the organization itself. In fact, you could say that a good measure of how well an organization is run is how closely those different incentives align.

In economics, this is called the principle-agent problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

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