The Effective Action of W₃ Gravity to All Orders

The effective action for chiral $W_3$ gravity is studied. It is shown that the computation of the effective action can be reduced to that of a $SL(3,\re)$ Wess-Zumino-Witten theory. If one assumes that the effective action for the Wess-Zumino-Witten model is identical to the WZW action up to multiplicative renormalizations, then the effective action for $W_3$ gravity is, to all orders, given by a constrained WZW model. The multiplicative renormalization constants of the WZW model are discussed and it is analyzed which particular values of these constants are consistent with previous one-loop calculations, and which reproduce the KPZ formulas for gravity and their generalizations for $W_3$ gravity.