Customer Reviews

What Price the Moral High Ground?: Ethical Dilemmas in Competitive Environments

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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.