¡@¡@This paper studies the MNE¡¦s choice of the optimal transfer price with the consideration of the possibility of transfer pricing penalty. Because the transfer prices are determined in-house, there are opportunities for MNE to manipulate the prices and evade corporate income tax and trade taxes. To reduce these opportunities, most governments have implemented transfer pricing regulations based on the OECD guidelines. If the MNE¡¦s manipulation of transfer prices is too flagrant, an extra tax will be levied to penalize the MNE. As long as the tax rates are different in different jurisdictions, the MNE will pick transfer prices that balance between the gain from profit shifting and the loss coming from the possible penalty. ¡@¡@Three forms of probability are introduced to capture the possibility of being penalized when the MNE tries to manipulate the transfer prices. We find close form solutions under the linear and quadratic forms of probability. And numerical simulation is used to get the optimal transfer price under the exponential form of probability.

Online group-buying is one of popular and innovative business models in the Internet age. Its essence is that the price will go down as the accumulated orders are increasing. A challenge is how to design the price curve, i.e., the relation between price and volume. Researchers have observed the consumer behavior phenomena of demand externalities, price-drop effect, and cycle ending effect in online group-buying transactions. All are related to the design of price curve. Therefore, if the price curve design can attract consumers and make profit as well, it will make the group-buying more successful. Based on above background, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility and then in turn on consumers¡¦ intention. In addition, this study also explores how the consumers¡¦ price sensitivity mediate the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. A field experiment was done first. Then, an online experiment was designed and implemented based on the observation of the field experiment. The research result indicates that price reduction frequency will positively affect the consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. Further, both consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility will affect the consumers¡¦ intention. In addition, the consumers¡¦ price sensitivity modulates the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. Finally, the observations of field experiment and lab experiment demonstrate the phenomena of demand externalities, price-drop effect, and cycle ending effect proposed by previous researches.

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the way people buy and sell. The internet is characterized by increased access to information. This increased information should foster convergence to the “law of one price,” for homogenous goods. The surge of electronic markets has motivated a stream of research focusing on comparing the efficiency of the internet market to the traditional one. This dissertation contributes to the existing literature of consumer search behavior in electronic markets and its effects on the price level and dispersion in the market more generally. A part of this dissertation assesses the direct and indirect effect of increased internet usage on the prices of airline tickets, using a unique contemporaneous online and offline transaction data for airline tickets, covering the final quarter of 2004. The study also investigates the relationship between increased internet usage and price dispersion in the market for airline tickets. This study also includes an exhaustive set of controls for airline ticket characteristics, namely refundability, advance purchase requirements, travel and stay restrictions, class of travel, departure and return day of the week and time, flight level load factor along with other market structure data used in the standard airlines literature. The existing theoretical literature in consumer search extended to the electronic markets assumes, for simplicity, that all consumers in the internet markets are the “searchers,” looking for the lowest price. The internet, however, also plays the role of a convenient shopping medium for a group of consumers whose primary motivation is not to search for the lowest price. The contemporary literature incorrectly categorizes these consumers as the traditional searchers. The remaining part of this dissertation provides a modification to the existing theoretical models of consumer search to accommodate both searchers and non-searchers in each of the electronic and traditional markets and derive the implications of the increased internet usage on the average level of prices and price dispersion in a market selling a homogenous good.

In the study, we choose the companys that had conducted IPOs or SEOs between 2005 and February 2006 as studying samples. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the issuing firms choose among different underwriting mechanisms and the factors influencing the choice of underwriting mechanisms. Empirical result shows that issuing factors are the important factors that influence the choice of underwriting mechanisms. The firms that conduct IPOs usually trend to choose bookbuilding method, but the firms that conduct SEOs trend to choose fixed price method instead. On the other hand, we also find that issuing scale is another significant factor influencing the choice of underwriting mechanisms and the effect is more apparent on the firms that conduct SEOs. The firms with bigger issuing scale trend to choose bookbuilding method but the firms with smaller issuing scale trend to choose fixed price rather than bookbuilding method.

This investigation is based on the data of the IPO on the OTC market in Taiwan for 1995 to 1999. We demonstrated that firms would use higher offering price to attract institutional investors, and lower offering price to attract small investors. Higher offering price abstracts institutional investors because of higher turnover rate of the IPO stocks. Lower offering price would attract small investors because of higher degree of IPO underpricing. We also show that the firms attracted more institutional investors` ownership would have higher performance.

The objectives of this study were threefold: (1) to determine a suitable model for defining the farm-retail price spread for two percent and whole milk in seven cities (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Hartford, Seattle, St. Louis); (2) to discover the determinants that contribute significantly to the price spreads of two percent and whole milk in seven selected cities, and (3) to calculate the elasticity of price transmission for whole and two percent milk in the seven cities. The work of Wohlgenant and Mullen in -Modeling the Farm-Retail Price Spread for Beef" was followed in order to determine a suitable model. The two specifications considered were the markup pricing model and the relative price spread model. Factors considered to affect the farm-to-retail price spread of whole and two percent milk were the retail price for whole and two percent milk, marketing costs such as fuel and labor costs, milk production, seasonality, and structural change. Monthly data were collected over a 106 month period from January 1994 through October 2002 for the selected cities in this investigation. Principal findings from the analysis are the following. The markup pricing model was determined to be the better model for both products throughout the seven cities through the examination of the Schwarz and Akaike criteria of model selection. The driving forces of the farm-to-retail price spread for whole and two percent milk in most cites were retail price and seasonality. In addition, the price spreads in the Northeast were significantly lower before and during the implementation of the Northeast Dairy Compact compared to the period corresponding to the termination of the program. The price spreads of both whole and two percent milk were highest in the third quarter and lowest in the fourth quarter. Elasticities of price transmission, measures of the sensitivity of retail prices to changes in farm prices, were higher in all regions for two percent milk compared to whole milk. The range of the elasticities of transmission for whole milk was from 0.37 (Hartford) to 2.54 (Dallas) and from 0.39 (Hartford) to 3.66 (Dallas) for two percent milk.

Accurately representing the price-demand relationship is critical for the success of a price optimization system. This research first uses booking data from 28 U.S. hotels to investigate the validity of two key assumptions in hotel revenue management. The assumptions are: 1) customers who book later are willing to pay higher rates than customers who book earlier; and, 2) demand is stronger during the week than on the weekend. Empirical results based on an analysis of booking curves, average paid rates, and occupancy rates for group, restricted retail, unrestricted retail, and negotiated demand segments challenge the validity of these assumptions. The combination of lower utilization rates and greater product differentiation suggests that hotels should apply different approaches than simply matching competitor rates to avoid losing market share. On days when inventory is near capacity, traditional yield management tactics deliver tremendous value, but these should be augmented by incorporating price response of demand and competition effects. On days when demand is soft and occupancy is projected to be low, price and competition based strategies should dominate. The hotel price optimization problem with linear demand model is a quadratic programming problem with prices of products that utilize multiple staynight rooms as the decision variable. The optimal solution of the hotel price optimization problems has unique properties that enables us to develop an alternative optimization algorithm that does not require solving quadratic optimization problem. Using the well known least norm problem as a subroutine, the optimization problem can be solved as finding a minimum distance between a polyhedron defined by non-negative demand and capacity constraints. This algorithm is efficient when only a few of the staynights are highly constrained. In practice, the choice of a demand model is largely driven by the ease of estimation and model fit statistics such as R2 and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). These metrics provide measures of statistical validity of the model, however, they do not measure how well the price optimization will perform which is the ultimate interest of the practitioners. In order to measure the impact of demand models on price optimization performance, we first investigate the goodness of fit of linear demand models with different driver variables using actual data from 23 U.S. hotels representing multiple brands and location types. We find that hotels within the same location types (such as urban, suburban, airport) share similar driver variables. Airport and suburban hotels have simpler model specifications with less drivers compared to the urban hotels. The airport hotel demand models are different from other location hotels in that the airport hotel demand level does not differ by day of week. We then measure the impact of demand model misrepresentation on the performance of price optimization through simulation experiments, which are performed for different levels of demand and forecast accuracy to represent various market environments that hotels operate in. We find that using models with missing driver variables can reduce the potential revenue by 13%∼53% and using the wrong functional form 5%∼43% under our simulation environment. The findings from our research imply that correctly representing the demand model in price optimization is crucial to its success. In order for hotels to realize the maximum potential revenue through pricing, efforts should be focused on identifying the major driver variables influencing demand including the ones that we found to be significant.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity International University, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-132).

Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): E. Cory Yoder, David V. Lamm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100). Also available online.

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