This article is quite interesting for the isolated baseball analysis but is ultimately a long-winded discussion (which goes down a sports rabbit hole which ultimately doesn't contribute to the argument.) The TLDR is:
> If we want to look at the quality of decision making, it’s too simplistic to say that we expect a firm to make good decisions because they’re exposed to markets and there’s economic value in making good decisions and people within the firm will probably be rewarded greatly if they make good decisions.
Is there actually anything a reader here can take from this writing other than the assertion I quoted above (which is the author's point of view and isn't proven in nearly as much rigour as the baseball analysis is.)
I think the argument holds up: it is that, even in a field where management decisions can be clearly quantified, the data is collected, and people are doing the analysis, bad decisions persist (management makes bad decisions when they could make good decisions, and the market does not value good management decisions). So in a field where it is much less clearly quantified, why would we expect the market to ensure high-quality management decisions?
I don't think the post proves that the market fails to incentivize good decisions. That's a hard thing to prove. It does certainly give us serious reason to doubt the common claim that the market succeeds in incentivizing good decisions on a short timescale. (It might still be true, but we should have much less confidence in that statement being true than before we read this post.)
The claim "the market succeeds in incentivizing good decisions on a short timescale" is at odds with the article's demonstrated conclusion "the market fails to incentivize good decisions on a short timescale in the field of baseball". So you're left with two possible ways to resolve this: either baseball is unique and the market doesn't work properly there for reasons that don't generalize (but the article gives some reasons to believe that this isn't the right way to resolve the contradiction), or baseball isn't special and non-baseball markets very likely do similar things.
> If we want to look at the quality of decision making, it’s too simplistic to say that we expect a firm to make good decisions because they’re exposed to markets and there’s economic value in making good decisions and people within the firm will probably be rewarded greatly if they make good decisions.
Is there actually anything a reader here can take from this writing other than the assertion I quoted above (which is the author's point of view and isn't proven in nearly as much rigour as the baseball analysis is.)