> Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this?
Because nearly nothing in the world works on the level of individually self-serving, containerized ideas which have direct one-to-one causes and effects.
As an exercise, instead imagine these companies operating on high latency, realtime digital signal graphs running at low sample rates.
Say one of those companies' graphs needs to operate on an incoming stream of 10,000 samples. The company obviously desires the highest frequencies to pass into the "payment received" output.
So they add an "anger-the-boss" filter into the signal chain.
There aren't just direct consequences here-- each change causes a rippling effect for the consequent samples. And that rippling effect clearly changes the behavior of some consequent victims. For example, if victims already heard about these nasty tactics and they want to keep their current job, they might decide to pay if those tactics are still being used.
It probably doesn't get the optimal output for the company. But the article talks about how a 1% change in payment rates can be the difference between success and bankruptcy. Like most realtime systems, they don't have the luxury of screwing around with potentially better outcomes if it ever means missing deadlines for paying the company's bills.
You'd probably drive yourself crazy thinking of all human affairs as low-latency DSP graphs. But I would propose doing the exercise however long it takes to get rid of the pattern of reflexively approaching any new social puzzle by positing a perfectly self-interested and self-contained individual sample.