American citizens often complain about how high CEO salaries are. The SEC attempted to mitigate this, and required CEO salaries to be publicly disclosed. As a result, they increased approximately three-fold between 1976 and 1993, going from 36 times the average worker pay to 131 times the average worker pay. "It encouraged other CEOs to demand higher pay, since now they had hard data telling them they were underpaid."[1]

[1] Source: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Re-published here: http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/predictably-irrational/1642