George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) 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 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, the paper for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. In Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market, Akerlof and coauthor Janet Yellen (his wife) propose rationales for the efficiency wage hypothesis in which employers pay above the market-clearing wage, in contradiction to the conclusions of neoclassical economics.

In his latest work, Akerlof and collaborator Rachel Kranton of Duke University introduce social identity into formal economic analysis, creating the field of Identity Economics. Drawing on social psychology and many fields outside of economics, Akerlof and Kranton argue that individuals do not have preferences only over different goods and services. They also adhere to social norms for how different people should behave. The norms are linked to a person's social identities. These ideas first appeared in their article "Economics and Identity", published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2000.

Markus K. Brunnermeier is a financial economist specializing in financial crises and panics. His work focuses on the role financial frictions (e.g. transaction costs) play in the formation and collapse of economic bubbles. Brunnermeier is an associate editor of The American Economic Review as well as the Journal of Finance and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at the London School of Economics he attended various universities in Germany and the United States. Upon graduating in 1999, Brunnermeier accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University. He currently serves as Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University's Bendheim Center for Finance, a position he has held since 2008.

Growing up in Landshut, Germany, Brunnermeier expected to follow his father into the business of carpentry. A slump in the housing market pressured Brunnermeier into the tax office and the Army. In 1991 he enrolled in the University of Regensburg where he received his undergraduate degree in 1993. He continued his studies in the masters program in economics at Vanderbilt University before returning to the Bonn Graduate School of Economics under the European Doctoral Program. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1998.

Jeremy James Siegel (born November 14, 1945) is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Siegel comments extensively on the economy and financial markets: he appears regularly on networks such CNN, CNBC and NPR, and writes regular columns for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Yahoo! Finance.

Siegel was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Highland Park High School. He majored in mathematics and economics as an undergraduate at Columbia University and obtained a Ph.D. from MIT in 1971. He is currently an advisor to WisdomTree Investments, a sponsor of exchange-traded funds, and as of early 2007 owns a 2% share of the $700 million market capitalization company.

He has been a frequent guest on the business TV program Kudlow & Company on CNBC, where supply-side economics fan Lawrence Kudlow hosts. He is a supply-sider like Kudlow. Siegel is also a lifelong friend of Robert Shiller, an economist at the Yale School of Management, whom Siegel has known since their MIT graduate school days. Siegel and Shiller have frequently debated each other on TV about the stock market and its future returns, and have become financial media celebrities, regularly appearing on CNBC.