George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). Akerlof graduated from the Lawrenceville School and received his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1962, and his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1966, and has taught at the London School of Economics. Akerlof is perhaps best known for his article, “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”, published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, in which he identified certain severe problems that afflict markets characterized by asymmetrical information.
George Akerlof
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