An Approach to Transfer Pricing Under Uncertainty
从代理理论视角，将转让定价视为一种在不确定性、偏好差异和信息不对称下，激励代理人（如部门经理或分包商）做出最优生产决策的机制，并探讨了确定性条件下机制的推广。
From the perspective of agency theory, newer insights perhaps can be gained into issues of decentralization and transfer pricing. Transfer pricing can be viewed as a mechanism which simultaneously establishes incentives for the agent (such as a divisional manager or a subcontractor) and induces an optimal decision on the quantity of production when such a decision is delegated in a decentralized setting. In this paper, we consider a principal (such as top management), who delegates a production decision to an agent and wishes to induce decisions through compensation. The word proper refers to whatever is optimal under the circumstances (including uncertainty, divergence of preferences, and information asymmetry). One example of such setting (see below for a discussion of another scenario) is the relation between a contractor (principal) and a subcontractor (agent) whereby production is subcontracted because of economies of scale and scope and there is no intermediate market for the transferred product. The problem of devising an optimal transfer price mechanism in a world of certainty was addressed by Ronen and McKinney (henceforth RM) [1971]. They did not consider whether their transfer price mechanism generalizes to a world of uncertainty. Moreover, their mechanism assumed that the divisional managers (agents) wish to maximize their respective divisional accounting profits, and that there is only information asymmetry (no moral hazard).1