George Arthur Akerlof

Akerlof, George Arthur, 1940–, American economist, b. New Haven, Conn., Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1966. He has been a professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (1966–78, 1980–) and the London School of Economics (1978–80) and served as a senior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1973–74). In 2001 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence for their work explaining how asymmetries with respect to information affect markets. Akerloff's seminal paper on the subject discussed issue with respect to the used-car market. He has also examined how a person's social identity affects their economic behavior and how conditions can lead business executives to loot their businesses for personal profit rather than grow the business.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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