Abstract
This paper reviews the economic literature which deals with the tautness of plans and with its relevance to macroeconomic pressures in Soviet-type economies. It opens with a discussion of Kornai 's shortage economy, a systemic approach to pressure, which is an alternative to the plan-related tautness coined by Hunter, and deals tautness from the agency angle, both in a static framework and in a dynamic, ratchet-related, framework.
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*This is a revised and updated version of a paper that was originally prepared for the Hunter Conference, Haverford, PA, March 1989. I thank Marcella Mulino, Claudio De Vincenti, and Pietro Puccinelli for helpful discussions in the formative stages of this paper, and the participants of the Conference.
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Keren, M. Survey Article: Optimal Tautness and the Economics of Incentives in Bureaucracies. Comp Econ Stud 35, 85–117 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.1993.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.1993.4