Abstract: Commodity price is an internal factor affecting the development of international trade, while the bargaining power is an external manifestation of the commodity comprehensive competitiveness. By constructing a trade commodity contract-price model based on two-tier heterogenic random frontier, this paper aims to explore the essence of the bargaining power of the internationally traded commodity price at the nation level. The results indicate that the bargaining power of the internationally traded commodity price has some asymmetry, due to the greater strength of the exporting countries than importing countries in commodity price negotiation, which benefits them to gain more profits from their stronger bargaining power. It is found that the bargaining power has two main characteristics: one is that the commodity bargaining surplus gained by exporting countries is increasing year by year, while that of the importing countries is on the contrary; the other is that as for those ASEAN small nations with relatively backward economy, their bargaining power has not much differences in their import and export goods. Countries with better developed economy can have stronger bargaining power for their exports and gain more benefits. Only a few countries could have access to higher surplus from part of goods bargaining, most of them can only obtain lower surplus from the bargaining part. The effects of tariffs on goods bargain is quite obvious, on average, about 0.503% decline of the price level of internationally traded commodity contracts between China and the ASEAN is brought about by the falling tariffs.

Key words: fair value of traded commodity; bargaining power; comment; two-tier heterogenic random frontier model