I want the DCOs hungry enough for money to [edit: make better policy], but not so ludicrously hungry that they’ll work hard to sabotage all the metrics and cause the state itself to become delusional.

Does that make sense?

Therefore, while their pay must be coupled to their performance, it needs a layer of indirection.  They bet with a fake currency that can’t be directly converted into real money, and they are paid based on their overall performance over multiple bets, which is unlikely to rise or fall quite so sharply that one of their personnel will freak out and cause an incident of corruption.  

There may be other ways to accomplish this goal.