Abstract
George Akerlof is forever associated with his landmark 1970 paper, ‘The market for “lemons”’, which transformed the way economists approach markets where there is a difference between the transacting agents in the information they possess. This concept of asymmetric information, with its major impact on many fields of economics, was singled out when, in 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (along with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz). A more comprehensive assessment of his contribution to economics would be as providing a better behavioural underpinning for macroeconomics as a major figure in the New Keynesian movement.
This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, 2008. Edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume
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Main, B.G.M. (2008). Akerlof, George Arthur (Born 1940). In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2723-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2723-1
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