As an example of asymmetric price transmission consider a situation when: One should remember that the size asymmetry cannot occur on its own.
The issue of asymmetric price transmission received a considerable attention in economic literature because of two reasons.
Firstly, its presence is not in line with predictions of the canonical economic theory (e.g. perfect competition and monopoly), which expect that under some regularity assumptions (such as non-kinked, convex/concave demand function) downstream responses to upstream changes should be symmetric in terms of absolute size and timing.
Secondly, because of the size of the some markets in which asymmetric price transmission takes place (such as petroleum markets), global dependence on some products (again oil) and the share of income spent by average household on some products (again petroleum products), asymmetric price transmission is important from the welfare point of view.
One must remember that APT implies a welfare redistribution from agents downstream to agents upstream (presumably consumers to large energy companies); it has serious political and social consequences.