• Executive Pay Deals Are Too Complex, Says Nobel Laureate Arguably, you don't need to be a Nobel Prize Winning economist to know this, but it always helps to have the smart guys back your hunches. Bengt Holmstrom, one of two U.S.-based professors who took this year's Nobel for economics for their research into contracts, told a press conference that executive pay plans have grown too complex and rely too much on consultants (he cited Nokia, where he was a board member for 13 years, as a prime example of a company that lost control of its compensation processes). Asked what he'd like to see, Holmstrom answered "robust plans that don't change every year." He might have added "brevity": 20-page disclosures in financial reports are more suited to concealing the real structure of executive compensation than to elucidating it. • From Bad to Worse at Ericsson Shares in Ericsson, the world's largest maker of mobile network equipment, plummeted 18% after a shocking set of third-quarter figures. Revenue in the core networks division was down 20%, while operating profit dried up almost completely. There had already been a hint of an earnings shock when the company announced recently it would expand its domestic layoffs. The results make it even more urgent for the Swedish company to appoint a new CEO, having parted with Hans Vestberg in July. The results have also dragged down shares in rival Nokia by over 5% in Europe this morning. Fortune • Windfall for Yum! Shareholders Yum! Brands, the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, doubled the size of its capital return program to a total of $13.5 billion by 2019, the fruit of its spin-off of its China business and a near-total migration to a franchising-based model. Those moves will cut the company's annual capital expenditure bill from some $500 million last year to $100 million by 2019, and will cut another $300 million from general running costs. The value of the China operations, which had promised to underpin growth for years to come, has been eroded recently by the after-effects of a tainted food scandal, and by increasing anti-American sentiment linked to territorial disputes over the South China Sea. Yum's China business will start trading on the NYSE on Nov 1. Fortune • Sprint Sells the Family Silver Mobile carrier Sprint is having to get innovative as it tries to keep its balance sheet intact through a painfully long price war with its bigger competitors. The Wall Street Journal reported that it intends to raise up to $3.5 billion from selling and leasing back its wireless capacity. That may not come all at once: the WSJ said Sprint values its airwaves at $14 billion, but that it only intends to put a little more than 10% of them up for sale initially. For context, $3.5 billion is around 10% more than the company's negative cash flow for the year ended March 31. With intense competition for subscribers still continuing, the Softbank-owned company is trying to cut costs by $2 billion or more in the current fiscal year. Fortune | 
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