George Akerlof

market for lemons; asymmetric information.

George Akerlof is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and a former Senior Resident Scholar at the IMF. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, shared with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz. His 1970 paper 'The Market for Lemons' showed how information gaps between buyers and sellers can collapse markets entirely, founding the modern economics of information.