Tim Baldenius

Negotiated versus Cost-Based Transfer Pricing

This paper studies an incomplete contracting model to compare the effectiveness of alternative transfer pricing mechanisms. Transfer pricing serves the dual purpose of guiding intracompany transfers and providing incentives for upfront investments at the divisional level. When transfer prices are determined through negotiation, divisional managers will have insufficient investment incentives due to “hold-up” problems. While cost-based transfer pricing can avoid such “hold-ups”, it does suffer from distortions in intracompany transfers. Our analysis shows that negotiation frequently performs better than a cost-based pricing system, though we identify circumstances under which cost-based transfer pricing emerges as the superior alternative.

Intrafirm Trade, Bargaining Power, and Specific Investments

This paper compares the performance of standard-cost with negotiated transfer pricing under asymmetric information. Negotiated transfer pricing generally achieves higher expected contribution margins, as this method tends to be more efficient in aggregating private information into a single transfer price. Standard-cost transfer pricing confers more bargaining power to the supplier and therefore generates better incentives for this division to undertake specific investments. The opposite holds for buyer investments. If a corporate controller has disaggregated information about divisional costs and revenues, then the firm can improve upon the performance of standard-cost transfer pricing by setting a centralized transfer price equal to expected cost plus a suitably chosen mark-up.

Cost Allocation for Capital Budgeting Decisions

Investment decisions frequently require coordination across multiple divisions of a firm. This paper explores a class of capital budgeting mechanisms in which the divisions issue reports regarding the anticipated profitability of proposed projects. To hold the divisions accountable for their reports, the central office ties the project acceptance decision to a system of cost allocations comprised of depreciation and capital charges. If the proposed project concerns a common asset that benefits multiple divisions, our analysis derives a sharing rule for dividing the asset among the users. Capital charges are based on a hurdle rate determined by the divisional reports. We find that this hurdle rate deviates from the firms cost of capital in a manner that depends crucially on whether the coordination problem is one of implementing a common asset or choosing among multiple competing projects. We also find that more severe divisional agency problems will increase the hurdle rate for common assets, yet this is generally not true for competing projects.

Advising and Monitoring CEOs: The Dual Role of Boards

The board of directors performs the dual role of monitoring and advising the firm’s management. At times it makes certain key decisions itself. We study the optimal board composition (of monitoring and advisory “types”) within a cheap-talk framework where the CEO and the board each may have private information about an impending investment decision, and their incentives are imperfectly aligned. When shareholders choose both the board composition and the allocation of decision rights between CEO and board, a non-monotonic relationship between CEO bias and board composition emerges. A key concern to practitioners and regulators is “CEO power”. Counter to conventional wisdom, we show that powerful CEOs who nominate board members themselves may in fact prefer a greater degree of monitoring intensity on the board than do shareholders. As a result, regulatory interventions (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) that attempt to strengthen the monitoring role of boards, may in fact be harmful in precisely those cases where agency problems are the most severe. Lastly, CEOs may be able to entrench themselves by choosing “complex” projects involving greater information advantage. In response, shareholders may commit to an advisor-heavy board to preempt entrenchment.

Performance Evaluation and Corporate Income Taxes in a Sequential Delegation Setting

We consider a setting where a firm delegates an investment decision and, subsequently, a sales decision to a privately informed manager. For both decisions corporate income taxes have real effects. We show that compensating the manager based on pre-tax residual income can ensure after-tax NPV-maximization (“goal congruence”) for each decision problem in isolation. However, this metric fails if both decisions are nontrivial, since it requires asset-specific hurdle rates and hence precludes asset aggregation. After-tax residual income metrics (e.g., EVA) allow the firm to consistently apply its after-tax cost of capital as the hurdle rate to its aggregate asset base. We show that existing tax depreciation schedules may explain why firms in practice use more accelerated depreciation schedules than those suggested by previous studies. Our findings also rationalize the widespread use of “dirty surplus” accounting for windfall gains and losses for managerial retention purposes.

Integration and Incentive Contracting when Risk is Endogenous

Integrated ownership is often seen as a way to foster specific investments. However, even in integrated firms, managers invest to maximize their compensation, which is chiefly driven by divisional income. Thus it is not clear that integration has any effect on investments in a world of decentralized decision-making. Building on recent findings that efficiency-enhancing investments raise not only the expected value of a project but also its variance, we show that, under plausible conditions, integration calls for low-powered incentive contracts: the managers invest more as they are less exposed to the investment-related (endogenous) risk, and the principal of an integrated firm has more to gain from greater investment. On the other hand, integration may result in higher-powered incentives if the project is inherently very risky or if the project-specific input is personally costly to the managers (rather than a monetary investment). The qualitative takeaway remains, however, that the contract adjustments under integration mitigate any input distortions present under non-integration. We also allow for firmwide performance evaluation under integration and show that it may lead to larger input distortions, but those are outweighed by improved risk sharing.

Market-Based Transfer Prices and Intracompany Discounts

Firms frequently value internal transactions at external market prices subject to an intracompany discount. These discounts are generally explained by cost differences between internal and external sales. In a model where the supplying division has monopoly power in the external market, we find that cost differences are neither necessary nor sufficient for intracompany discounts to be desirable. The imposition of discounts always increases the divisional profits of the buying division, but may also lower the divisional profits of the selling division. We derive conditions for discounts to enhance firm-wide profit. We also study the sensitivity of the optimal discount to cost differences between internal and external transactions. Under certain conditions, market-based transfer prices subject to optimally chosen discounts perform well. If the buying division sells its final product in a competitive market and if demand and cost parameters are positively correlated, then market-based transfer pricing induces the divisions to engage in transactions which are nearly efficient from the corporate perspective.