[levi-turner]

Beyond salary, there is a whole industry of data brokers who get transactional data from individual participants in an industry vertical (CPG, Health Insurance, Salary, etc), aggregate it with their competitors and present it back to those participants as benchmarks. Management Consulting likewise is a way to launder getting strategic insight into your competitors from a third-party.

[ghaff]

There's a long long history--especially when a lot of information was more opaque than today--when companies quietly shared a bunch of information with middlemen because they needed that information from other companies to function and the middlemen skimmed some of the the take.

Even price sheets that we would consider very rudimentary today were part of that.