> In the late seventies and early eighties, American economists began to travel to the Soviet Union and Gordon Tullock, an American economist who should have received the Nobel Prize for his work in public choice theory, took the opportunity, on a visit to Gosplan in Moscow, to ask that very question. Rather sheepishly his respondent took out a rather ancient Sears Roebuck catalogue from his desk and handed it over. Tullock didn't know what to make of this until it was explained that the Gosplan officials used the prices quoted for goods in the catalogue to obtain relativities between this and that item. They would then try to match the goods of the catalogue to what was available in the Soviet Union and then fix prices according to the relativities prescribed by Sears Roebuck. Where there was no match of product they just had to guess. So prices in the USSR were determined by Sears Roebuck. http://archive.hrnicholls.com.au/archives/vol23/vol23-1.php