Strategy and Choice.

• Author: Leitzel, Jim

Edited volumes have a well-deserved reputation for eliciting low effort from their contributors, at least relative to peer-reviewed journals. The reasons are understandable, given the nature of the (perhaps implicit) contract between contributors and editors and the resulting potential for opportunistic behavior. And the reputation is self-enforcing. Once contributors understand that others will be suspicious of the quality of their work in non-refereed outlets, they will have less incentive to provide high quality. The occasional edited volume that nevertheless succeeds in presenting an array of high-quality work therefore presents a puzzle--how was it accomplished, and can similar methods succeed more generally? Richard Zeckhauser's excellent collection poses such questions. One answer that it suggests is to rely on non-pecuniary forms of motivation, perhaps by tying the contribution to personal relationships with an admired and renowned colleague. Strategy and Choice is a tribute to Thomas Schelling.

In general, it is a worthy tribute, with most of the topics closely aligned to subjects in which Schelling's research was pioneering. Most of the chapters are also accessible to non-economists; indeed, a substantial minority are written by non-economists. Those who provided endorsements for the back cover of the volume signal the wide appeal--Solow and Hirshleifer are not surprising, but they are joined by Linda Wertheimer of National Public Radio and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Breyer. The chapters, other than Zeckhauser's introduction, are grouped into 3 areas, distinguished by whether the problems they address generally involve one, a few, or many decisionmakers. Space considerations necessitate a selective review.

Robert Frank kicks off the initial, "many player" section by looking at "positional externalities," situations marked by the players' interest in their relative positions. The wars of attrition that arise from the battle to achieve the best relative position are used by Frank to examine such diverse phenomena as excessive formalism in economics, bureaucratic jargon, and restrictions on the length of work weeks. These situations might feature occasional abrupt changes, as the social waste arising from the war of attrition may eventually provide incentives for some individuals to opt out of the competition, and governmental limits on the wasteful competition may also be appropriate. The positional externality theme is...