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This book is short, accessible and thought-provoking. . . . Frank draws heavily from game theory and evolutionary biology to explain why do-gooders work for less and firms that don't squeeze suppliers and cheat customers profit over the long run. -- "Washington Post
Moral behavior is not irrational . . . Frank insists. The challenge is to define self-interest in a manner capacious enough to accommodate the real motives for people's choices. Frank does this with a mixture of Darwinian science, psychology, and flexible common sense. -- Laura Secor, Boston Globe
What Price the Moral High Ground? Is wide-ranging and well-written. -- John J. DiIulio, Jr., The Weekly Standard
[Frank's] vision is one that allows people to strive to meet their chosen goals and promotes the common good in an ordered cosmos--which is exactly where many of us want to live. -- Merrill Matthews, Business Economics
Moral behavior is not irrational . . . Frank insists. The challenge is to define self-interest in a manner capacious enough to accommodate the real motives for people's choices. Frank does this with a mixture of Darwinian science, psychology, and flexible common sense. -- Laura Secor, Boston Globe
What Price the Moral High Ground? Is wide-ranging and well-written. -- John J. DiIulio, Jr., The Weekly Standard
[Frank's] vision is one that allows people to strive to meet their chosen goals and promotes the common good in an ordered cosmos--which is exactly where many of us want to live. -- Merrill Matthews, Business Economics
Review
This book is short, accessible and thought-provoking... Frank draws heavily from game theory and evolutionary biology to explain why do-gooders work for less and firms that don't squeeze suppliers and cheat customers profit over the long run. -- "Washington Post Moral behavior is not irrational ... Frank insists. The challenge is to define self-interest in a manner capacious enough to accommodate the real motives for people's choices. Frank does this with a mixture of Darwinian science, psychology, and flexible common sense. -- Laura Secor, Boston Globe What Price the Moral High Ground? Is wide-ranging and well-written. -- John J. DiIulio, Jr., The Weekly Standard [Frank's] vision is one that allows people to strive to meet their chosen goals and promotes the common good in an ordered cosmos--which is exactly where many of us want to live. -- Merrill Matthews, Business Economics
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First Sentence
RATIONAL CHOICE MODELS typically assume that people choose among possible actions so as to maximize the extent to which they achieve their goals. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
RATIONAL CHOICE MODELS typically assume that people choose among possible actions so as to maximize the extent to which they achieve their goals. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Why are prison stripes the new fashion trend sweeping the ranks of executives caught pulling cheap tricks on Wall Street? Read Robert H. Frank's book to find out, although it is probably too theoretical to have an immediate influence on business practices. Frank offers a timely, penetrating critique of the contemporary social science notion that rational people always act out of self interest, without charitable or moral inclination. Frank shows why this dangerously simple-minded approach to human nature threatens to diminish further the moral standards of the West, which are already about as ugly as that frog you dissected in high school biology. Be forewarned, this is a philosophical presentation. It is not a practical volume filled with profit making, cheerful case studies. If that's what you're looking for, just drop the cover price into your legal defense fund. In hopes that Frank's ethical treatise will have a strong influence over time, we highly recommend it to those seeking a strong theoretical basis for simply doing the right thing.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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1 review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Some snapshots of social preference research
14 Aug 2008
Format:Paperback
Economist Robert Frank is a productive man who has the laudable habit of explaining insights of academic economics in understandable words for the general public. This book treats the spontaneous emergence of cooperative behavior amongst human beings, a fascinating topic which has been the focus of much research lately. Unfortunately, it is not one of Frank's best books. As a rather unbalanced collection of essays, it does not do justice to the sizeable literature on social preferences and cooperation.
The book consists of three parts. The first looks for the evolutionary roots of cooperative behavior. The main argument is that cooperation pays because cooperators are able to recognize each other in the population, so that they are not taken advantage of by opportunistic types. In the third chapter Frank builds an interesting evolutionary argument for the role of emotions. The second part discusses the social and economic relevance of cooperative tendencies. How much money are people willing to forego to satisfy their social preferences? The last part investigates how cooperative inclinations can be fostered. It investigates the impact of social norms on behavior, and the influence of the pervasive model of homo economicus.
The book is easy to read, written in an accessible style. Unfortunately, the book is not a comprehensive summary of research on cooperation. Rather, it takes a few snapshots of this research on which it elaborates. Perhaps not surprisingly, these snapshots are often the research papers of Frank himself. This is good for those who are interested in methodology: Frank has done his best to highlight controversial issues, as well as the theoretical tradeoffs that modelers of human behavior have to confront. However, it is not clear why the general reader would want to know the details of academic discussions about whether A's or B's model best explains a rather specific phenomenon. At the same time the book does not mention entire research agendas on trust and cooperation that have been pursued in the last decade. If one wants a book that does a more complete job you may want to look to "The Company of Strangers" by Paul Seabright.
The book consists of three parts. The first looks for the evolutionary roots of cooperative behavior. The main argument is that cooperation pays because cooperators are able to recognize each other in the population, so that they are not taken advantage of by opportunistic types. In the third chapter Frank builds an interesting evolutionary argument for the role of emotions. The second part discusses the social and economic relevance of cooperative tendencies. How much money are people willing to forego to satisfy their social preferences? The last part investigates how cooperative inclinations can be fostered. It investigates the impact of social norms on behavior, and the influence of the pervasive model of homo economicus.
The book is easy to read, written in an accessible style. Unfortunately, the book is not a comprehensive summary of research on cooperation. Rather, it takes a few snapshots of this research on which it elaborates. Perhaps not surprisingly, these snapshots are often the research papers of Frank himself. This is good for those who are interested in methodology: Frank has done his best to highlight controversial issues, as well as the theoretical tradeoffs that modelers of human behavior have to confront. However, it is not clear why the general reader would want to know the details of academic discussions about whether A's or B's model best explains a rather specific phenomenon. At the same time the book does not mention entire research agendas on trust and cooperation that have been pursued in the last decade. If one wants a book that does a more complete job you may want to look to "The Company of Strangers" by Paul Seabright.
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