I think there is a standard, so as long your bank’s app supports it and more importantly the merchant actually provides a QR code to scan (which is unlikely).
Then again, I don’t see much need for that when I can just NFC pretty much everywhere (of course the merchant still ends up paying up to 1% on every transaction)
Tapping my phone on an NFC terminal seems much easier and more straightforward than having to scan a QR or install a third party app and having to figure out how to link it with my bank account. There is just probably not a lot of demand for a system like this in much of the west (in cases where you can’t use a card there is always SEPA instant payments)
> There's nothing obvious about this to me - how would you distinguish that from survivorship bias?
So success of companies is entirely random? That seems statistically unlikely…
I mean are you really saying that there are no decisions that CEOs regularly take due to which a company might lose/gains up to millions to billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t you pay a CEO whose actions can bring the company billions a 100m or so? Seems like a good deal..
e.g. if you put a random highly competent, educated and very hardworking person in charge of Apple back in 1997 is it more or less likely that he would have done better than Jobs?
I mean, yeah I agree with you in part. In most cases it’s hard to distinguish real impact (even after a few years) from survivorship bias which is why this whole process is so inefficient. I’m sure that quite a few companies are just as likely (if not more likely) to hire a 100+ mil CEO who’ll be a net negative on as one who’s action will bring 10x+ in additional revenue compared to what most other candidates would have.
I’m not that sure that a higher proportion of profits going to the shareholders would be a better outcome. Sure the money saved by paying the CEO less might result in lower prices or go to lower ranked employees but it’s not obvious to me that that’s necessarily what would happen.
Depends how you measure “earning”. If we look at Google’s stock price and growth in relation to its competitors he possibly cost significantly more money to the company than he was paid.
> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none
A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).
By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.
Would Apple have become one if not the most successful companies of all time if they had all the other people who helped Jobs accomplish this but not him?
I do agree in principle but it’s not that obvious to me if overall it would be much better if all the surplus went to the shareholders instead. At least CEOs generally have to actually work for that money..
> CEO's aren't special
some CEOs are terrible, a lot are mediocre and a few are indeed special and worth every penny they get and much more (from the utilitarian/rational point of the company’s shareholders). The problem is that it’s very hard to tell in advance..
I don’t think “skillset” is the right word either. It’s the financial outcome of the decisions the CEO makes which is the only thing that really matters. Which is notoriously hard to measure and impossible to do in advance. So companies tend to use various proxies when hiring like past experience and less useful ones like skills, education, character, personal connections, work ethic etc.
Obviously this system is very inefficient but nobody can deny that some CEO are better than others and that the best ones can make decisions which bring 10-100x or more money to the company than whatever they are paid.
So if the board of 100 billion company believes that a CEO they can hire for 100 million will increase growth/profits by more than 10 million CEO would it seems perfectly rational to pay him as much (they might be awful at picking the ’best’ person but that does not invalidate the core principle)
> how many super hard working and ultra educated people
Both attributes seem to be somewhat tangentially related to being a highly successful CEO.
There are plenty of examples of “super hard working” and educated CEOs running their companies to the ground and costing much, much more than just $200 million..
Then again, I don’t see much need for that when I can just NFC pretty much everywhere (of course the merchant still ends up paying up to 1% on every transaction)