"Quantity Versus Quality in the Soviet Market for Weapons" is no. 52 in the PERSA series. The paper is by Mark Harrison, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover, and Andrei Markevich, Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Warwick. The paper is about bargaining over quantity and quality in Soviet defense procurement. Military market places display obvious inefficiencies under most arrangements, but the Soviet defense market was unusual for its degree of monopoly, exclusive relationships, and intense scrutiny (in its formative years) by a harsh dictator. This provided the setting for quality versus quantity in the delivery of weapons to the government. The paper discusses the power of the industrial contractor over the defense buyer in terms of a hold-up problem. The typical use that the contractor made of this power was to default on quality. The defense ministry’s counter-action took the form of deploying agents through industry with the authority to verify quality and reject substandard goods. The final compromise restored quality at the expense of quantity. Being illicit, it had to be hidden from the dictator. The paper is available free of charge from www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa.