[ghaff]

Companies use third-party services all the time to benchmark prices of all sorts of things--including compensation and other benefits. And it's not even clear why this is a problem. The extreme opposite position is to have the minimum amount of pricing transparency which would make it hard to have a meaningful market.

[berniedurfee]

Market benchmarks are used to set minimums or maximums for compensation or pricing that workers or consumers will just barely tolerate. That’s the threshold these benchmarks measure.