“Balancing Purposeful Complexity with Greater Simplicity” from the HRPA Center on Executive Compensation (executive summary here) encourages a rethinking of executive pay design to reduce complexities that include, among many other things, a mismatching of time horizons associated with long-term incentives and TSR calculations, hypothetical (often unrealized) payouts, voluntary and supplemental proxy disclosures that aim to explain lengthy and often confusing regulatory-mandated disclosures, terminology variations across companies that impede comparability, and more.
The report includes questions for the compensation committee to consider in exploring a potential redesign and realistic, alternative simplification approaches the compensation committee may wish to explore.