before introducing capacity mechanisms governments should consider their impact on incentives and define common rules on a marketwide basis they are quite heavyhanded administrative interventions which may ultimately lead to reregulating many parameters of electricity markets their introduction can be motivated by a lack of trust in energyonly markets or poorly designed electricity markets however capacity markets involve very technical discussions still ongoing about the incentives and their expected effects price restrictions or regulatory opportunism governments anticipate that they will not let electricity prices go high enough during periods of scarcity