WBG manufactures and sells electronic transducers that are used in military and commercial products. WBG has three divisions: Transducer Division. Military Division, and Commercial Division. The Transducer Division designs and produces transducers that are sold externally as well as internally to the Military Division and the Commercial Division. Both the Military Division and the Commercial Division incorporate transducers in their final products that are sold to non- WBG end users. Because of the unique proprietary design of the WBG transducers. Military and Commercial Divisions only use WBG transducers in their products. All of WBG's sales are in the United States.

The three divisions are profit centers and about 50 percent of the Transducer Division output is sold externally, while the remainder is sold internally to the Military Division and the Commercial Division. WBG currently uses a full-cost transfer pricing policy for the transducers. The senior managers of the three divisions receive about 40 percent of their compensation tied to the performance of their division and the balance is received as base salary.

Because of the incessant bickering among WBG's three divisions' management teams over its current transfer pricing policy, the CEO of WBG attended a seminar on transfer pricing. After attending the seminar, the CEO proposed the following new policy for transducers: "Each month the transfer price of transducers will be the same as the external market price the Transducer Division receives for transducers sold to external customers, if. and only if. the Transducer Division is at capacity for the month. Otherwise, the transfer price is the Transducer Division's variable cost for the month.

- Explain the benefits of the proposed policy.

- Explain the likely changes in behavior among the three divisions that the new policy is likely to produce.

- Give examples of additional data that should be collected and how you would analyze the data before making a decision regarding whether or not the new transfer pricing policy should be adopted.