【正文】 ctions performed by the parties, contractual terms, economic circumstances and business strategies. Description of Resale Price and Cost plus Methods Briefly stated, under the resale price method, one pares the captive distributor’s gross margin on product sourced from affiliated panies with its gross margin on product sourced from unaffiliated panies. If the captive distributor does not source similar products from both affiliated and unaffiliated panies, one can pare its resale margin on products sourced from affiliated suppliers with the resale margins reported by unaffiliated distributors that source similar products from independent suppliers. An analogous parison is made under the cost plus method and the cost of services plus method, except that the profit level indicator differs. More particularly, under the cost plus and cost of services plus methods, the profit level indicator is equal to gross profits divided by cost of goods (or services) sold. Underlying Economic Rationale Less than one interpretation, the resale price method, applied to internal transactions, presupposes that individual distributors would pay similar purchase prices to their multiple suppliers on an arm’s length basis and charge their unrelated customers similar selling prices. This set of assumptions, in turn, implies that (a) suppliers operate in the same petitive market or have no binding capacity constraints and value the subject distributor’s business relatively highly, and (b) the distributor cannot (and is not forced to) differentiate among its customers in establishing its selling prices. If the resale price method depends on these assumptions for its validity, gross margin parisons would only be valid if the products generating such margins are quite similar, not simply of the “same general type”. Similarly, the cost plus method, applied to internal transactions, may presuppose that individual manufacturers are unable to differentiate among customers in establishing their selling prices, and employ the same or similar technologies in producing product for different customers. Again, under this rationale, the products on which markups are being pared must be closely similar. Alternatively, the economic rationale for internal parisons of resale margins or cost plus markups may simply be that individual distributors and manufacturers would necessarily earn a reasonably uniform gross margin or markup across transactions, consistent with the return that investors would require. As applied to external transactions, the only economic rationale for the resale price and cost plus methods would seem to be that market forces will equalize resale margins and gross markups across firms. Critique of Economic Reasoning As previously discussed, there is no reason to expect gross margins or gross markups to be equalized across firms, and, therefore, no good reason to pare an affiliated distributor’s (or manufacturer’s) resale margin (or gross markup) with the corresponding results reported by its unaffiliated counterparts. Therefore, as with the CPM, the resale price and cost plus methods, as applied to external transactions, are not founded on valid economic principles. Absent suppliers’ manufacturing capacity constraints and the potential for price discrimination, parisons of an individual distributor’s resale margins on product sourced from related and independent suppliers, respectively, makes a certain amount of sense. On an arm’s length basis, the distributor would source exclusively from the