Allow my to indulge myself once again with the conclusion to my Japanese thoughts. Again, there are two parts.
First - during the roughly one hundred years of civil war, is was most common for warriors and samurai to be paid when they could present the head of an enemy after a battle. This led to some warriors trying to enter the battle late - after the majority of the fighting was completed - to collect a head. To counter this, significant effort was put into methods of determining if a head was removed pre or post-mortem. To me, this is a pretty good example of poorly designed incentives that lead to additional expenditure to remedy the situation.
Second - opportunistically switching sides was considered dishonorable. Extremely so. Samurai were expected to be willing to fight to the death for their employer, but in defeat, once they were threatened with death and had not flinched - thereby proving their worth and honor - they were offered a chance to switch sides. Dealing with incentives again, this of course decreased the expected cost of being "willing to die", and therefore decreased the meaningfulness and value of such an oath.
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