90-second Book Review: stay ahead in the repair game.

IF YOUR OUTSOURCED CONTRACTOR tells you that it will cost $500 extra to deal with an electrical-wiring flaw he has discovered behind your walls while renovating the kitchen, will you have the expertise to prove that he is exaggerating or the desire to provoke a guy with a nail gun who is going to be hanging out in your house for the next few months? More than likely, you will sheepishly pull out the checkbook.

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Such is life when dealing with some repairs, writes Wall Street Journal reporter James Hagerty, who reviewed "Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets," by Barry B. LePatner (Uni versity of Chicago Press, 229 pages, $25).

Development firms sometimes aren't really competing to deliver quality for the lowest possible price. Instead, according to LePatner, "They compete for the future right to increase the initial cost of their agreement." It's not that contractors are bad people, he writes. It's that we let them get away with these practices. Such unrigorous standards allow inefficient firms to remain in the game. "We end up with many firms," LePatner writes, "'but little head-to-head competition on the big economic variables of time, quality and price." Hagerty writes that LePatner's solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks--looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles--may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.