How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin

Andrei Markevich

No w0110, Working Papers from New Economic School (NES)

Abstract: In hierarchies, agents’ hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records to examine Stalin’s answers to this question. We find that Stalin's behaviour was consistent with his aiming to maximise the efficiency of the Soviet system of control subject to the loyalty of his inspectors and the risk of a “chaos of orders” arising from parallel centres of power.

Keywords: Casymmetric information; principal-agent problem; transaction costs; hierarchy; USSR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H83 N44 P21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2007-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nes.ru/files/Preprints-resh/WP110.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin (2011)
Working Paper: How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin (2007)
Working Paper: How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin (2007)
Working Paper: How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin (2007)
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