This paper examines Soviet industrial materials supply planning using official documents from the Soviet state and party archives. It examines the planning practices of the 1930s and uses two criteria suggested by Bergson to examine its efficiency. The actual practices of annual and quarterly...

When a principal gives an order to an agent and advances resources for its implementation, the temptations for the agent to shirk or steal from the principal rather than comply constitute the fundamental problem of command. Historically, partially centralised command economies enforced...