It's far more complex and simple than that in our case. The starting point is that 50% of revenue is allocated to "costs": overheads, base salaries, commissions

It's far more complex and simple than that in our case. The starting point is that 50% of revenue is allocated to "costs": overheads, base salaries, commissions and the bonus pool. How people decide to split that up between themselves is up to them, through a process that itself is open and semi-democratic (getting more so with each round of changes). If anything, I would say that seeing transparency as a weapon of management is really misguided. A manager could always lie and claim that Jim only took a 2% raise this year. With transparency, they can only say that if that is in fact the verifiable truth.