Decent intersection and Tor-rigidity for modules over local hypersurfaces

We study two properties of modules over a local hypersurface $R$: decency and rigidity. We show that the vanishing of Hochster's function $\theta^R(M,N)$, known to imply decent intersection, also implies rigidity. We investigate the vanishing of $\theta^R(M,N)$ to obtain new results about decency and rigidity over hypersurfaces. We employ a mixture of techniques from Commutative Algebra and Intersection Theory of algebraic cycles.