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The article concerns studies of quality factor, and problems of product quality control. Such components of quality as meeting demands of customers of target segment of market, conformance to standards, and lasting financial results are determined. Product quality factor is proposed.

Effectiveness of rewarding workers for producing high quality products; Soviet Union. Translated by Jean L. Hellie from Sovetskoe Gosudaratvo i Pravo, no. 2, 1982.

With a global drive towards implementing total quality management (TQM), the number of TQM failures is also increasing. One of the major reasons cited for these failures is lack of management commitment. However, no attempt has been made to diagnose why it occurs. Examines one possible determinant of this lack of commitment. Claims that if managers perceive a link between their firm's product quality and the customers' view of their product quality, then they will be motivated to improve product quality. Tests this argument empirically using a sample of 248 purchasing managers. Finds that there is a strong relationship between managers' perception of the quality of their product and managers' perception of customers' view of the firm's product quality, and provides some evidence that management's lack of recognition of the importance of product quality in serving the customers is probably not a reason for lack of management commitment to quality. Represents an early attempt to diagnose the underlying causes of the determinants of TQM failures.

I investigate the behaviour of a multiproduct monopolist supplying vertically differentiated varieties of the same good. The discretemodel adopted here allows to obtain a continuous model when, in the limit, the number of varieties becomes infinitely large. The main finding establishes that the tendency on the part of the monopolist to undersupply all qualities but the top one can take two alternative forms, i.e., either qualities correspond to the socially optimal ones but the allocation of consumers across qualities is distorted by the price schedule, or qualities are indeed lower than those supplied under social planning. The first case arises when the monopolist finds it profitable to restrict output, while the second obtains when the market is rich enough to induce the monopolist to supply the same quantity a social planner would produce. Policy implications are discussed.