I’ve long been a member of the “chief executives make too much” school. I think executive compensation is a socially corrosive issue, especially when the middle class is struggling. I think it creates morale problems when the C.E.O. makes so much more than even other top executives. But what offends me most is a somewhat different issue: that the market for executive compensation is so clearly rigged. Chief executives sit on one another’s boards, so they have an incentive to take care of one another. Directors are predisposed to want to make the chief executive happy since, after all, he or she is the one who picked them for the board. Far too often, a chief executive’s pay isn’t a result of an arms-length negotiation, but a result of a kind of a corporate buddy system.

Mr. Kay, of course, insists that there is a real market for C.E.O. pay — rather than the rigged market I just described — though he does grant that “C.E.O.’s have relative power compared to their boards.” He can cite statistic after statistic, using such measures as “realizable long-term incentive pay,” showing that high-performing chief executives put more money in their pockets than those whose companies do poorly.

But what struck me in speaking to him was the way in which he himself seemed to acknowledge that, at long last, the game itself was becoming at least a little less rigged. The constant clamor by institutional investors has had an effect on boards, he said. What’s more, “boards are starting to play hardball on severance, pensions and perquisites.” He added, “It is a strategic shift in the labor market, because these goodies used to come with the package.”

Indeed, he told me he had begun recommending to boards that the severance packages for chief executives, which have been such a source of controversy, be pared back, especially for chief executives who have been on the job for a while and have reaped considerable compensation rewards. Two companies, he added, had agreed to do so — though he declined to identify them. (They’re clients after all.) A few days after he spoke to me, Mr. Kay spoke at a conference run by Jesse M. Brill, one of the loudest executive compensation critics and publisher of CompensationStandards.com. When I spoke to Mr. Brill the day before the conference, he was practically beside himself with excitement — Mr. Kay, he told me, was going to publicly denounce outsize, and unnecessary, severance packages. “It’s a very big deal,” he said.

And it could be — if it leads other compensation consultants to follow his lead, and boards to begin rethinking big severance packages for C.E.O.’s who have either failed to perform or have been in the job so long they have already reaped tremendous rewards. But it’s also just a start. What we really need is confidence that boards are finally treating the shareholders’ money as if it were their own — and negotiating as fiercely as, say, Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox negotiates with Scott Boras, the famous player’s agent. Which leads to one last thought exercise. Baseball players also make outsize salaries, as do actors and rock stars. You could easily make the argument that their pay is also socially corrosive — part of the growing gap between rich and poor — and even unfair given how little teachers make by comparison. But even many of the same people who think C.E.O.’s are paid too much don’t take the same position about these other highly paid professions.

Why not? The reason, I’m convinced, is that we feel confident that they are being paid what the market says they’re worth. Their compensation has been set by a real market, not a rigged one. And markets, in the end, aren’t moral or immoral. They just are. We accept their judgment.