Since I just bought the eighth company because of it, I would suggest that AI companies should not use the wage matching clause.
For example, I went into a bidfight with a WWE wrestler and they offered him 900000$ so I withdrew from it. After that, I saw that 30 of their wrestlers went to 900000$ because of it. These wrestler were signed by the company during the gametime, so the setting wasn't there from the initial database.
The other companies had that problem when they went from Medium to Big size. They had wage matching on their lower popularity workers, but due to having to sign a "big name" they got one guy in and then the wage matching came into play. Within a month, they went from making a profit to making 15,000,000$ minus per month. So far, that exact scenario happened to seven companies.
In my opinion, that setting makes absolutely no sense at all. I would never use it for the wrestlers I hire and probably noone else puts it in either. And for the AI controlled companies, it's the number one reason to go under.