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.
