The Cobra Effect
In economics, the Rebound Effect is the implementation of one thing for a certain purpose but has unintentional negative externalities that have a greater negative effect than the original problem.
A great example of the rebound effect is the cobra tax in India. During British colonial rule in Deli, there was a cobra infestation. The British government wanted to get rid of these cobras. They implemented an incentive program to give each person who turned in a cobra skin a monetary reward. This worked at first then as the cobra population died off crafty entrepreneurs realized that they could breed and farm their own cobras to earn money instead of doing the hard work to get the cobras off the streets. After the British officials discovered that people were doing this they got rid of the program. The people breeding the cobras had no reason to keep all of these cobras and then released them back into the street making the problem worse than when the government wanted to get rid of the cobras in the first place.
How could this have been done differently?
I don’t think there are too many ways to prevent this from happening in a free market perspective. Because if you do any kind of incentive program people will just breed the cobras. One way that could have worked was hiring some of the soldiers already in India to kill the cobras and then stop killing them once they were eradicated. Or they could just create a snake-killing division to make sure the population is under control.
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