Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a Professor of Economics at Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. He is a monthly contributor to the "Economic Scene" column in The New York Times.
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Career
Frank holds a B.S. in mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an M.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics, both from UC Berkeley. Until 2001, he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences.
Frank has also been a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal, the chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Professor of American Civilization at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.
Notable theories
The race for status where we all lose
Frank is one of the first to highlight the perversities of what are known as positional arms races. His book Choosing the Right Pond shows how important status is, and how much we pay for our status. Frank argues that the race for status is bad for society as a whole, as there cannot be improvement in overall status available, because every time person A raises above person B, the sum of their status remains the same. The only thing that changes is which person is where in the hierarchy.
He reasons that this race for status explains partly why increases in wealth do not increase well-being, or do not increase it much. If most of our earnings are spent on an empty game of status, we should not expect much improvement in quality of life.
Winner take all
In his The Winner-Take-All Society, Frank discussed the fact that more and more of current economy and other institutions are moving toward a state where very few winners take very much, while the rest are left with little. Part of it is attributed to the modern structure of markets and technology.
This view can be seen as a call for serious changes in policy, because the well-being of the average citizen is by most accounts the main goal of social and economic policy.
The strategic role of emotions
In various economic papers and in the book Passion within reason, Frank discusses the idea that emotions have important roles in decision making and personal interactions, even when they seem to be irrational. For example, the emotions of love give more value to long term romantic commitment. A "rational" person would dump his partner as soon as he finds a better partnership. Emotional attachment gives more long term meaning to the relationship. Poetically "Those sensible about love are incapable of it"
Prisoner's dilemma and cooperation
Frank, Gilovich, and Regan (1993) is an experimental study of the prisoner's dilemma. The subjects were students in their first and final years of undergraduate economics, and undergraduates in other disciplines. Subjects were paired, placed in a typical game scenario, then asked to choose either to "cooperate" or to "defect". Pairs of subjects were told that if they both chose "defect" the payoff for each would be 1. If both cooperated, the payoff for each would be 2. If one defected and the other cooperated, the payoff would be 3 for the defector and 0 for the cooperator. Each subject in a pair made his choice without knowing what the other member of the pair chose.
First year economics students, and students doing disciplines other than economics, overwhelmingly chose to cooperate. But 4th year students in economics tended to not cooperate. Frank et al. concluded, that with "an eye toward both the social good and the well-being of their own students, economists may wish to stress a broader view of human motivation in their teaching."
Publications
Books
- Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status.. New York: Oxford University Press 1985
- Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. New York: W.W. Norton 1988
- with Philip J. Cook: The Winner-Take-All Society. New York: Martin Kessler Books at The Free Press 1995
- New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 1995;
- Business Week Top Ten Books of 1995;
- San Francisco Review of Books Critics Choice Award, 1995;
- China Times Top Ten Books of 1996;
- The London Observer Best Books of the Year List, 1996;
- Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese translations, 1996. Japanese translation, 1998. Spanish and Italian translations forthcoming.
- Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000
- What Price the Moral High Ground? Ethical Dilemmas in Competitive Environments. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004
- Microeconomics and Behavior. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill 2005
- with Ben Bernanke: Principles of Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill 2006
- The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Solutions to Everyday Enigmas. New York: Basic Books 2007
- Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press 2007
Articles
- Articles by Robert Frank 2005-2009 (PDF format)
- Robert Frank, Thomas Gilovich & Dennis Regan: Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation? in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 7, Number 2. Spring 1993. pp. 159–71 (PDF; 788 KB)
References
External links
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