The Effect of Environmental Risk on the Efficiency of Negotiated Transfer Prices
实验研究了环境风险如何影响买卖双方协商转移价格的效率，发现风险增加会降低达成协议的概率并延长协商时间，从而减少企业利润。
ABSTRACT This study investigates whether environmental risk affects the efficiency of negotiated transfer prices. We analyze a setting where the buyer faces environmental risk but the seller does not. From the risk‐neutral firm's perspective, the transfer should be made in our setting because the expected value of the buyer's profit is greater than the certain opportunity cost of the seller from the transfer. We develop hypotheses to predict that, as environmental risk increases, it becomes more difficult for buyers and sellers to reach agreement. Such difficulty reduces efficiency in terms of both firm profit and negotiation time. We test our hypotheses via an experiment in which buyer and seller dyads negotiate over the transfer of a resource at six levels of environmental risk. Results show that, as predicted, environmental risk decreases efficiency. Specifically, as environmental risk increases, the frequency of agreement decreases, thereby reducing expected firm profit. Further, environmental risk increases negotiation time for those dyads that are able to reach an agreement. Data suggest that the cause of the decreased efficiency is that buyers and sellers use different reference points for determining a fair transfer price and environmental risk exacerbates the effects of such differences.