  Ambient plasma electrons undergo strong heating in regions associated with
compressive traveling interplanetary solar-wind bulk-velocity jumps due to
their specific interactions with the jump-inherent electric fields. After
thermalization of this energy gain per shock passage through the operation of
the Buneman instability, strong electron heating occurs that substantially
influences the radial electron temperature profile. We describe the reduction
of the jump amplitude due to energy expended by the traveling jump structure.
We consider three effects; namely energy loss due to heating of electrons,
energy loss due to work done against the pick-up-ion pressure gradient, and an
energy gain due to nonlinear jump steepening. Taking these effects into
account, we show that the decrease in jump amplitude with solar distance is
more pronounced when the initial jump amplitude is higher in the inner solar
system. Independent of the initial jump amplitude, it eventually decreases with
increasing distance to a value of the order of $\Delta U/U\simeq 0.1$ at the
position of the heliospheric termination shock, where $\Delta U$ is the jump
amplitude, and $U$ is the average solar-wind bulk velocity.The electron
temperature, on the other hand, is strongly correlated with the initial jump
amplitude, leading to electron temperatures between 6000 K and 20 000 K at
distances beyond 50 AU. We compare our results with in-situ measurements of the
electron-core temperature from the Ulysses spacecraft in the plane of the
ecliptic for $1.5\, \mathrm{AU}\leq r \leq 5\,\mathrm{AU}$, where $r$ is the
distance from the Sun. We find a very good agreement between our results and
these observations, which corroborates our extrapolated predictions beyond
$r=5\,\mathrm{AU}$.
