Transfer pricing: a behavioural context

The accounting, management science, and economics literature contains numerous models addressing the resource allocation and transfer pricing problems. Some of the earliest statements on the transfer pricing problem are recorded by Hirshleifer (1956 and 1957), Dean (1955), and Cook (1955). These authors suggest solutions to the transfer pricing problem which reflect the analogy of the internal price problem to the determination of the (Competitive) market price of traditional economics. The advent of mathematical programming produced another stream of articles addressing the transfer price problem, especially after the relation between a decentralized firm and the Dantzig and Wolfe (1960) decomposition principle was stated by Whinston (1964) and Baumol and Fabian (1964).1