This paper compares the performance of transfer pricing and tidy cost allocations in a multiproduct firm in presence of output market competition and production externalities. In absence of competition, tidy cost allocations are creating inefficient allocations within the firm while transfer prices can always be adjusted to replicate the first best solution of the centralized firm. While the second result is well known, the first result draws a parallel to the impossibility of solving the free rider problem in team production by a profit sharing scheme. Under duopolistic competition, transfer prices are still the best accounting rule but the solution depends on the nature of competition on the final product market. When firms compete in prices, the strategic rationale requires to allocate more than the total cost of the congested service to the duopolistic departments. While transfer prices can still be adjusted accordingly, the tidiness requirement prevents the cost allocation scheme from providing the desired strategic incentives to the firms' managers. Under quantity competition, the strategic motive requires to allocate less than the cost of the service to the duopolistic departments. Although a tidy cost allocation scheme does not contradict the required direction of the strategic effect, the optimal allocation is at best found incidentally while the transfer prices can again always be adjusted in an optimal way.
This paper analyzes the use of transfer pricing as a strategic device in divisionalized firms facing duopolistic price competition. When transfer prices are observable, both firms' headquarters will exclude their marketing division from the external input market and charge a transfer price above the market price of the intermediate product to induce their marketing managers to behave as softer competitors on the final product market. When transfer prices are not observable, strategic transfer pricing is not an equilibrium, and the optimal transfer price equals the market price of the intermediate product. As an alternative, the firms can signal their competitor a transfer price above the market price of the intermediate input through a proper choice of their accounting system. The paper identifies conditions under which the choice of absorption costing is a dominant strategy for both firms. Moreover, when the firms' products are close substitutes, the strategic benefits of full cost based transfer pricing can provide incentives to maintain a production department that would not be able to survive as a separate firm in the long run.
This chapter reviews the recent economic literature on transfer pricing. As a starting point, we take Hirshleifer's transfer pricing model and discuss the basic structure of the most widely used model extensions. We review transfer pricing models with asymmetric information, transfer pricing models in incomplete contracting settings, strategic transfer pricing models, and international transfer pricing models with firms operating in different tax jurisdictions. The results offer a rich set of different explanations for the wide variety of transfer pricing methods in practice but they also show that it is impossible to give a general recommendation about “the” best transfer pricing method. By contrast, only limited progress has been made in arriving at a sufficient theory of decentralization. The models are either silent about organizational issues, or the advantages of decentralization are based on more or less restrictive informational assumptions. We conclude that the economic transfer pricing research has certainly improved the understanding of the relative usefulness of alternative transfer pricing methods for a carefully selected set of assumptions. Further theoretical and empirical research seems necessary for a better understanding of the economic reasons for decentralization and for explaining some unresolved empirical puzzles.
