Comment by jmull

> Companies clearly have a strong collective incentive to lower wages.

Of course they all have an incentive to pay the lowest wages they can. I did not think we needed to state that.

But what I don't see here is a synchronizing mechanism. That is, what here will push companies to *collectively offer below average salaries on average* vs above average salaries on average?

> ...Collude to keep average wages low, so that when they offer outliers "above-average" it is still cheaper to cross that many standard deviations.

Yes, companies could collude. CEOs and HR managers of a range of companies in an area or industry could start an email chain, or conference call, or slack channel and commit to keeping their average offers at 45th percentile or lower. That's collusion, and illegal.

But is that what Pave is offering? What's the communication channel or other synchronization signal they are providing? A chat channel? Bonuses for companies that keep their average offers below average? Penalties for companies don't? IDK, perhaps there is some collusion mechanism they provide, but we should not just imagine there's one without a reason.

> The problem imo is less about transparency and more about information asymmetry.

Sure, yes. But that's something different than collusion to fix wages. That's an argument that we want organizations like Pave, but ones that will provide the same data to job seekers.