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Lots of companies engage third party companies that give "industry averages" or "comparable company averages". The company pays them with dollars and also their own average pay information.

None of the companies are explicitly getting together and saying "let's keep pay at this level", but there's definitely some fishy stuff going on.

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Since forever, there has been a huge industry of essentially information middlemen who act as a conduit for information companies can't directly ask a competitor for and wouldn't be given it if they could.

Totally outside of the HR realm, when I was a computer system product manager pre-Web, we had a consulting firm that we paid way too much money to and when we were going to have a product launch, we asked them to, yes, fax us data sheets on various products we were positioning against. Later, there was another firm that collected pricing information which we needed for our pricing proposals.

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