Who deserves more money:

The corporate lifer who rises to the top of Philadelphia's biggest company?

The Main Liner who skips college to become one of the NBA's top scorers and a pitchman for shoes, soda and sunglasses?

Or the South Jersey student council president turned action-movie hero?

The answer may depend on your point of view. But here's what they make:

Delaware County native H. Edward Hanway, who spent 22 years climbing the corporate ladder to lead Cigna Inc. and its 45,000 workers in 40 countries, collected $10 million in cash and stock profits last year, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Kobe Bryant, who went straight from Lower Merion High School to the National Basketball Association and became one of its top scorers, collected $12 million from his Los Angeles Lakers contract, plus millions more endorsing products such as Adidas and Sprite.

Penns Grove High graduate Bruce Willis, the guy with all the funny lines in a string of violent movies, collected an estimated $70 million, according to Forbes magazine's yearly list of high-paid entertainers.

By comparison, the median U.S. insurance adjuster earned $42,000 last year; the median paid athlete made just $32,000; and the median full-time motion-picture services worker made $54,000, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the Philadelphia area, median cash and stock compensation for CEOs at more than 200 publicly traded companies was $470,000 in 2001, up from $450,000 a year earlier, according to The Inquirer's annual survey.

That compares with a median $1.3 million (in both years) for members of another elite group - players in the National Basketball Association.

The highest-paid members of both groups collected tens of millions of dollars.

"Socially there's no need for them to make $20 million a year. They would work for less," says economist Robert H. Frank, co-author of The Winner-Take-All Society, a 1995 best-seller chronicling how people in top jobs make a lot more than others with nearly as much talent or responsibility.

Yet corporate boards - like team owners and mass-market movie-makers - keep shelling out bigger bucks. "There are a lot of pianists and a lot of basketball players, but only a few really great ones," said Edward G. Boehne, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and a director of Toll Brothers Inc. and three local financial institutions. Likewise, there are "relatively only a few [potential CEOs] who can get the job done the way the board wants it."

Not that there is anything inevitable about star pay levels: Boehne said European executives were paid far less - a fact he attributes to cultural or "socioeconomic" differences.

Is superstar pay really tied to super performance? When the spotlight wanes, star athletes and entertainers lose most of their income, Frank noted. In the 1980s, onetime Philadelphian "Sylvester Stallone seemed like he could guarantee a packed movie house. But with two or three films in a row that nobody went to, that got rethought," Frank said. Stallone vanished from Hollywood's high-paid A-list.

Do corporate executives also lose when corporate performance slips? They should, argues Jon R. Boscia, chairman of Philadelphia-based insurance-and-investments giant Lincoln National Corp., whose pay - mostly in bonuses and stock options - fell from $9 million in 2000 to less than $6 million last year as profits slipped.

"Too often CEOs become quite full of themselves and forget we're no different from any other employee," Boscia said last week. "When I read about some CEO's compensation and some CEO's lifestyle - using corporate aircraft for personal business and personal travel - it makes me sick.

"Far too often [CEOs] feel they can do whatever they want without accountability to anyone. It's embarrassing to be associated with these people."

Despite the falling stock market and the biggest drop in U.S. corporate profits in 20 years, median cash and stock compensation for more than 1,000 senior executives at publicly traded Philadelphia-area companies rose to $342,000 last year, up from $304,000 last year and $301,000 in 1999, according to The Inquirer's annual survey.

Doesn't that amount to better pay for worse performance? When pay is high and "a company is doing well, everyone agrees that's pay for performance. But when a company has problems, sometimes it takes more of a talented individual to get those problems worked out," Boehne said.

Berwyn-based Triton PCS Holdings Inc., a money-losing mobile-phone company whose stock has dropped 80 percent in the last two years, gave chief executive officer Michael E. Kalogris $26 million in restricted stock last year "to foster the long-term focus required for success in the wireless telecommunications industry," according to Triton's executive compensation committee.

But not all companies feel they can afford fat incentives.

Jones Apparel Group Inc., the Bucks County-based clothing-maker formerly headed by billionaire philanthropist Sidney Kimmel, withdrew an executive stock-option plan for his newly named successor last month after Wall Street investors protested the potential cost.

"After reflecting on input from shareholders, [I] have concluded that stockholders' interests are better served at this time by a reconsideration of incentive compensation... including my own," chief executive officer Peter Boneparth said at the time.

Graef Crystal, an executive pay consultant turned critic and Bloomberg News columnist, was outraged by the $43 million MBNA Corp. gave the region's best-paid executive, president Charles M. Cawley, last year, after the credit-card company's first annual stock price decline since it went public a decade ago.

In earlier years, Cawley was "paid on the basis of absolute performance, not relative performance," according to Crystal. "You have to hold your nose," he added. MBNA, whose profits rose to a record $1.7 billion last year, did not return calls.

Some of the best-paid Philadelphia executives did take big pay cuts last year. Ralph J. Roberts, who built Comcast Corp. into one of the nation's biggest cable-TV companies, collected $22 million, mostly in stock-options profits. That's down from $88 million last year, and $104 million the year before, thanks partly to the poor performance of Comcast stock since last summer when it announced costly plans to buy AT&T; Corp.'s cable network.

But it's still enough to place Roberts among the region's best-paid executives. It's also more than some of Comcast's better-known employees take home: Allen Iverson earns close to $12 million a year, and teammate Dikembe Mutombo makes more than $13 million each year from the Philadelphia 76ers, a unit of Comcast-Spectacor.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt says chief executives should be penalized for poor performance: He recently called on top executives of companies whose earnings have been revised downward to give back part of their bonuses and stock-options profits.

That call has been applauded by some observers. "I agree. They ought to give the money back," said Herbert Lotman, chairman of one of the nation's biggest private companies, Keystone Foods L.L.C., and until recently a member of the executive compensation committee of the region's biggest bank, First Union Corp. But he doesn't think that should apply to former First Union chief executive officer Edward Crutchfield, who collected millions for making costly mergers that proved far less profitable than the bank predicted.

"Crutchfield built that bank from nothing," Lotman said, blaming subordinates for merger troubles. "I have no problem with what we did for him."

While some CEOs have even shorter careers than most pro ballplayers or top-dollar actresses, people who start profitable companies and manage to keep control of them for decades have a chance to create truly large fortunes.

Examples in the Philadelphia area, besides Roberts, include the Annenbergs (TV Guide), the Dorrances (Campbell Soup Co.), beer and soda distributor Harold Honickman, James J. Kim (Amkor Technology Inc.), and Alfred P. West Jr. (SEI Investments Co.).