Property Rights and Decision Making in the Soviet Union: Interpreting Soviet Environmental History.

Soviet history consists of two periods which differ according to degree of environmental concern. The difference is explainable in the context of a property-rights analysis of the Soviet hierarchy. In a model in which membership in the hierarchy is understood as a quasi-transferable property right, the degree of Soviet environmental conservation is directly related to the degree of stability of the hierarchy. Democratic in stitutions within the hierarchy serve to mitigate the informational problems that accompany collective decisionmaking. Copyright 1988 by Oxford University Press.