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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Meancvar on 2025-07-03 00:08:09+00:00.

Bored of the repetitive posts maybe from bots, I have a different story about economic incentives.

I used to work for a multinational that allowed to fly business class for intercontinental client trips. It must have been some accountant worrying that employees could trade the ticket in, fly coach, and pocket the money, because the policy stated that the boarding passes needed to be included in the expense report.

Since people hated to spend 6-10k USD on a ticket and get reimbursed a month later once they could produce boarding passes, they all bought their tickets at the last minute, thus paying $10-15k. (this is the economic lesson: people respond to incentives).

So the company ended up overpaying for plane tickets because it didn’t trust the employees. The policy changed when people started using electronic boarding passes and forgot to ask for paper ones. Genius bean counters must have found significant savings in the average flight costs, but probably they were too dumb to figure it out.