There is a trend in regulatory practice towards providing dedicated incentives for strategic investments. Italy and the United States have the longest experience with authorizing returns and risk-mitigating incentives that deviate from standard regulatory treatment for policy purposes. In these countries, the regulatory incentives are based on a case-by-case assessment of capital projects. We find that the Italian scheme is simpler, which reduces administrative costs. The U.S. scheme is more advanced in the case-by case assessment. Even though dedicated incentives may be controversial, our analysis of both experiences shows that, notwithstanding significant learning costs, both schemes have facilitated substantial financial investment in strategically important infrastructure. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.