Traditionally, public utilities have had relatively centralized decision making and have made limited use of incentive compensation (especially for lower-level managers and employees). Given the changes in the business environment, it is likely that local specific knowledge will become more important. For example, the tastes and preferences of customers can become more important to a company as it faces increased competition. Also, maintaining state of the art technology can become more important. These arguments suggest that deregulation might motivate a further decentralization of decision rights. Correspondingly, to make the three legs of the stool balance, one might expect increased use of incentive compensation. Empirical studies of deregulated industries tend to support these conjectures.