- published: 03 Jun 2011
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George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist and University Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He won the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). Previously he was Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Akerlof was born in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the son of Rosalie (née Hirschfelder) and Gösta Åkerlöf, who was a chemist and inventor. His mother was Jewish, from a family that had emigrated from Germany. His father was a Swedish immigrant. Akerlof graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1958 and received the Aldo Leopold Award in 2002. In 1962 he received his BA degree from Yale University, in 1966 his PhD degree from MIT, and taught at the London School of Economics 1978–80.
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 asymmetric information, the paper for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial 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.