The Dynamics of Controversial Practices: SEC Sunshine, Aspirational Pay, and the Evolution of Executive Compensation Networks

受2006年美国证券交易委员会(SEC)要求大公司报告薪酬同行的法规的刺激，最近的一系列论文得出结论，许多公司倾向于“有抱负的”同行(即规模更大、CEO薪酬高于重点公司的公司)。关于公司使用有抱负的同事的研究集中在偏见的流行率和平均总体水平上，并试图从组织和CEO特征而不是网络环境的角度来解释偏见。然而，上市公司在不同维度的网络中相互联系，包括行业和规模上的相似性、董事会联锁、薪酬顾问的共享，以及公司在设定高管薪酬时使用的断言薪酬同行网络。这项拟议的研究检验了这样一种理论，即对合法性的压力和有争议的做法的合理化是通过局部比较机制产生的，这既涉及信息传递，也涉及有争议的做法的模仿和共同进化。利用面向随机行为者的网络分析方法，本研究将估计社会影响和社会比较对2006年后薪酬网络演变的影响，届时，由于新的SEC规则，网络对研究人员和公司本身都是新的可见的。这些问题是通过分析一个独特的数据库来解决的，该数据库包含了自新法规生效以来报告了这些信息的公司的薪酬同行信息。智力价值：这个项目的智力价值是它承诺了对上市公司薪酬同行网络动态的新理解，以及这些动态对有争议的组织实践的传播和修改提供的启发。一份关于创新扩散和组织做法的长期文献将所讨论的做法视为相对固定的做法，并研究了在人口中扩散的速度和程度。最近，学者们关注于这样一个事实，即许多组织实践是有争议的，因此它们随着环境压力和组织参与者和利益相关者的利益冲突而前进、演变和后退。最近的文献强调了组织的特征(例如，实践与组织和组织行为者在不同维度上的“契合度”)，这些特征潜在地解释了有争议的做法的采用、适应或放弃。相比之下，组织网络对有争议做法的传播和演变的影响相对较少。拟议的研究有助于填补这一空白。在这个过程中，它可能会解释高管薪酬同龄人群体中整体薪酬上升的偏向是如何维持的，以及这种偏向是否可能持续到未来。更广泛的影响：拟议的研究的更广泛影响包括本科生和研究生的培养，以及拟议的研究对公共政策的潜在价值。该项目还将允许继续以其他地方没有的规模收集关于薪酬同行的纵向数据。项目完成后，这些数据将提供给其他研究人员，非技术受众也可以访问。使用Java脚本和HTML5可以将查询结果可视化为网络，并且网络描述符将以表格的形式呈现。通过这样的基础设施发布数据允许将数据用于教育目的，并允许非技术受众探索这一丰富的数据源。用于从证券交易委员会电子档案中的公司年报中识别和提取同行的算法可以很容易地推广到在各种情况下提取以前无法获得的系统化数据项。将提供说明，以允许研究人员将该算法用于此类目的。

Stimulated by 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations that required large firms to report their compensation peers, a set of recent papers have concluded that many companies favor "aspirational" peers (i.e., larger companies and with better paid CEOs than the focal company). Research on the use by companies of aspirational peers has focused on the prevalence and average overall level of bias, and has attempted to explain bias in terms of organizational and CEO characteristics rather than in terms of the networked environment. However, public corporations are tied to one another in networks along various dimensions, including similarity in industry and size, board interlocks, the sharing of compensation consultants, and the network of asserted compensation peers used by companies in the setting of executive compensation. The proposed research tests the theory that pressures for legitimacy and rationalizations of practices of contested legitimacy occur through mechanisms of local comparison, which involve both information transfer and the mimicry and co-evolution of controversial practices. Using stochastic actor oriented network analytic methods, the proposed research will estimate the effects of social influence and social comparison on the evolution of compensation networks in the post-2006 period, when the network is newly visible both to researchers and to the corporations themselves as a consequence of the new SEC rules. These questions are addressed through the analysis of a unique database that contains information on compensation peers for the universe of companies that have reported this information since the new regulations came into effect.Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project is the new understanding it promises about the dynamics of compensation peer networks of publicly traded corporations and the illumination these dynamics offer on the diffusion and modification of controversial organizational practices. A longstanding literature on the diffusion of innovations and organizational practices treated the practices in question as relatively fixed and studied the rate and extent of diffusion through the population. More recently, scholars have focused on the fact that many organizational practices are controversial, and as a consequence they advance, evolve, and retreat in response to environmental pressure and the conflicting interests of organizational actors and stakeholders. This recent literature emphasizes characteristics of organizations (e.g., the "fit" of the practice with the organization and organizational actors along various dimensions) that potentially explain the adoption, adaptation, or relinquishment of controversial practices. In contrast, the impact of organizational networks on the spread and evolution of controversial practices is relatively unexplored. The proposed research contributes to the filling of this gap. In the process it may provide an explanation for how the overall upward compensation bias in executive compensation peer groups is maintained and whether it is likely to persist into the future.Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of the proposed research include the training of undergraduate and graduate students and the potential value of the proposed research for public policy. The project will also allow the continued collection of longitudinal data on compensation peers on a scale that does not elsewhere exist. After the project is concluded, these data will be made available for other researchers and also accessible for a non-technical audience. Using Javascript and HTML5 the query results can be visualized as a network, and network descriptives will be presented in a table. Publishing the data through such an infrastructure allows the data to be used for education purposes, and it allows non-technical audiences to explore this rich data source. The algorithm used to identify and extract peers from corporate annual reports in the electronic archive of the SEC can easily be generalized to extract systematic and previously unavailable data items in a wide variety of contexts. Instructions will be provided to allow researchers to use the algorithm for such purposes.