Mr. Stiglitz pointed out that waiting lists confined to single cities undermined incentives of the poor to look for work elsewhere.

But it is also an arrangement that will involve a much more complicated system of energy transactions among newly competing companies, one that some officials fear could undermine incentives for the maintenance, expansion and coordinated operation of the power grid itself.

Some Conservatives also suspected that the welfare ethic - by removing the risks and disciplines of the market, providing a cushion for failures, and undermining incentives for the ambitious - weakened enterprise.

Such redistribution is more easily imagined than accomplished, though, by a government that honors property rights and is reluctant to raise taxes very much, lest it undermine incentives for savings and production.

Not only would it be remarkably difficult to develop these new abilities to such an extent that they could offset the effects of the largest foreseeable supply interruption, but achieving them might have an unexpectedly negative effect: undermining incentives to increase oil production and decrease demand.

This may be because such extrinsic, top-down incentives may undermine intrinsic and reputational incentives which overall may make the behaviors less desirable to do.

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery.

Provision of unlimited money undermines incentives for greater efficiency which is why nationalised industries always run at a loss.

RIM also runs the risk of undermining incentives for developers to create dedicated PlayBook applications by making it so easy for them to port their existing software from other platforms.

It also highlights the regulatory problem I mentioned of zero risk weighting for eurozone sovereign debt, which undermined market discipline and created perverse incentives.