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...

Cost-based transfer pricing is used by many firms. However, there exist many cost-based methods that may be centralized or decentralized. If centralized, the firm's central office has discretion how accurately to measure the divisions' costs. In order to measure cost reliably, the firm must...

The so-called disclosure principle is a 'puzzle' in the accounting literature: Game theoretic models of financial markets show that in equilibrium firms should disclose all their private information. Yet, the result is not convincing. Researchers have therefore built sophisticated models in...

This paper compares the performance of alternative cost-based transfer pricing methods. We adopt an incomplete contracting framework with asymmetric information at the trading stage. Transfer pricing guides intra-company trade and provides incentives for value-enhancing specific investments. We...

This paper reviews traditional German cost accounting in general and its most pervasive cost accounting system, namely, marginal costing, in particular. An outline of the structure of the system is followed by a discussion of its relationship to activity-based costing. We then consider how both...