Reframing executive compensations: An assessment and outlook

This article develops and applies a new framework for understanding and interpreting the breadth of executive compensation research and theory. This framework sorts the literature along three dimensions that reflect three basic issues in compensation design: how to pay (specifying the mechanism for linking pay criteria to pay consequences), when to pay (specifying the criteria for awarding pay), and what to pay (form of pay consequence). This framework helps to highlight areas where executive compensation research has stalled, areas it has ignored, as well as providing direction for re-energizing the field by outlining questions for future research and theory building.