Why does the top one per cent of the population capture such a disproportionate amount of the wealth? Why do top athletes win dozens of sponsorship deals, yet competitors who finish just moments behind struggle to attract a single deal? Why does one product become a runaway success, while others flounder and fail? The answer is the rise of 'winner-take-all' markets, in which small differences in performance lead to huge differences in reward. More relevant today than ever before, this fascinating book shows how in business, as in sport, thousands are competing for only a handful of top prizes. As Robert Frank and Philip J Cook reveal, this relentless emphasis on coming out on top has shaped our society and how we define success in troubling ways, creating growing income inequality and an enormous misallocation of talent, as more and more gifted people seek the big bucks and limelight of lucrative yet non-essential careers while vital professions scramble to attract staff. But there are measures we can take to create a more equitable and more prosperous future, and "The Winner-Take-All Society" shows the way.

Author Biography

Robert H. Frank is the author of The Sunday Times bestseller The Economic Naturalist and The Return of The Economic Naturalist. He is the Henrietta Louis Johnson Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management and is a regular economics columnist in The New York Times. Philip Cook is the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and author of Paying the Tab (Princeton University Press, 2007).