Multidivisional firms frequently rely on external market prices in order to
value internal transactions across profit centers. This paper examines marketbased
transfer pricing when an upstream division has monopoly power in
selling a proprietary component both to a downstream division within the
same firm and to external customers. When internal transfers are valued at
the prevailing market price, the resulting transactions are distorted by double
marginalization. The imposition of intracompany discounts will always
improve overall firm profits provided the supplying division is capacity constrained.
Under certain conditions it is then possible to design discount rules
so that the resulting prices and sales quantities are efficient from the corporate
perspective. In contrast, the impact of intracompany discounts remains
ambiguous when the capacity of the selling division is essentially unlimited.
It is then generally impossible to achieve fully efficient outcomes by means of
market-based transfer pricing unless the external market for the component
is sufficiently large relative to the internal market.