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Why do schoolchildren harass nerds and freaks? John H. Bishop, Matthew Bishop, Lara Gelbwasser, Shanna Green, and Andrew Zuckerman have made an impressive effort to provide some answers to this interesting and important question. In addition to gathering and analyzing new data, Bishop and his colleagues develop and explore an economic model that explains why some students choose to become nerds and others choose to become athletes. This economic approach is consistent with much previous work on individual and family decisionmaking about a wide range of subjects including employment, education, marriage, and fertility but has not, to my knowledge, been employed to this particular situation. The essence of the model is to characterize the objectives, opportunities, abilities, and constraints faced by students to derive explanations for why some students become nerds or freaks and others become athletes, for example.

Focusing on the Economic Model

Students face a binding time constraint. Put simply, kids have a fixed amount of time to allocate among the alternative activities available to them. They can spend their time on learning and studying, on sports or other extracurricular activities, or on hanging out with their peers (socialization), or they can spend their time in solitary leisure. Because time is fixed, they cannot do it all and must choose how much time they spend on each activity.

How do students make these choices? Essentially, they choose based upon the impact that time spent has, ultimately, on their happiness. For extracurricular activities and socializing, happiness depends upon the time they spend on these activities and also on their individual ability to turn time spent on an activity into utility, or happiness. The reward of solitary leisure depends only upon time spent; it is assumed that everyone is equally able to derive happiness from solitary leisure.

Thus students' allocation of time determines their accomplishments in various areas, in the amount of learning they garner, and in the extent to which they are harassed by other students. An important contribution of this model is to explicitly specify the rewards to learning and the ways in which individual and peer learning and accomplishment interact to determine each student's success and his or her treatment by peers.

According to the model in this paper, learning yields three kinds of rewards. Intrinsic rewards accrue simply because a student enjoys learning. Extrinsic rewards accrue based upon the level of learning or increase in human capital resulting from, say, the value in the job market of knowing Java or speaking French. Rank rewards accrue based upon the rank of the student relative to the other students in the school, regardless of any learning or human capital accumulation stemming from, for example, becoming valedictorian.

A critical feature of the economic model is that each student's utility (or happiness) also depends upon popularity. As with learning, a number of factors determine a student's popularity, including the student's accomplishment in sports and at socializing, how successful a student is at conforming with peers, and on the extent and causes of competition in the school. Specific functions capture the relationship between popularity (or harassment) and students' accomplishment in extracurricular activities, socialization, conformity with peer group norms about academic commitment and achievement, and the "costs that studious individuals impose on others by pushing ahead of them in a competitive ranking system."

The result is a set of equations (the economic model) that captures the problem facing the student. Given his or her own abilities and preferences, and constrained by time and the behavior and characteristics of the school and peers, the student is viewed as solving the problem of determining how to balance time spent on different activities to be as happy as possible. The model is intuitively appealing and internally consistent, and it yields interesting insight about phenomena that have attracted little attention from economics.

The model is then used to motivate subsequent empirical work, although the links between the model and the statistical analyses...