Robert H. Frank

Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a Professor of Economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He contributes to the "Economic View" column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times.

Career

Frank holds a B.S. in mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1966, 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

Further information: Expenditure cascades

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 rises 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.

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 found a better partnership. Emotional attachment gives more long term meaning to the relationship. Put poetically: "Those sensible about love are incapable of it." Similarly, anger can be used as a precommitment device. Envy can be useful in that it enforces more fair distributions. By acting "irrationally" when treated unfairly, a person can obtain better results in situations which resemble the ultimatum game if their opponent anticipates their emotional response and adjusts their strategy accordingly.

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."

the negative effects of studying economics

In a highly cited work, Frank showed that the study of economics reduces cooperation in games. The idea is that much f the time cooperation and consideration of others' perspective are irrational in the narrow sense of the word. Thus, learning that cooperation is irrational in some games is influencing the behavior of the students, presumably to the negative. [1]

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 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
• 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 (2003) ISBN 0071214593
• with Ben Bernanke: Principles of MacroEconomics. New York: McGraw-Hill (2006) ISBN 0073193976
• 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
• The Return of the Economic Naturalist. How Economics Helps Make Sense of Your World. Virgin Books, London 2009 ISBN 978-0-753519660
• The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2011) ISBN 0691153191

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)

External links

• Robert H. Frank's personal website
• "Economic Naturalist" a talk given by Frank on June 22 2009 (audio).
• Cornell University's Biography of Professor Robert H. Frank
• Robert H. Frank's Views on Tax Policy - a critique
• Book excerpts and audio interview on NPR
• Robert H. Frank on Rag Radio, December 11, 2011, interviewed by Thorne Dreyer and Roger Baker (57:25)