You missed the "or has a tendency to incite" part. It's important because incentive doesn't promise a change in action. People can do things even when they have have no incentive to do it. Sometimes people will even do things when they have every incentive not to do it.

If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.