George Akerlof
description: an American economist who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on information asymmetry
158 results
Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone
by John Y. Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai · 25 Jul 2025
-interested businesspeople are just as strongly motivated to supply the mistaken demands of confused customers. This pernicious behavior is what the Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller call “phishing for phools.”8 The perversion of capitalism in the personal finance system is familiar in a different context. Until about
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, Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi, “The saving glut of the rich” (unpublished paper). 36. This is the behavior that Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller call “Phishing for Phools” in the title of their 2015 book. 37. Cass Sunstein and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Richard Thaler
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111 (2021): 2377–2416, highlight this fact. 7. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, books 1–3, ed. Andrew S. Skinner (Penguin Classics, 2013). 8. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools (Princeton University Press, 2015). 9. These and other examples can be found at “10 evil vintage cigarette ads promising
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and, 193, 277n32; marketing aimed at, 274n9. See also race Africrypt exchange, 191 age, financial literacy and, 33–35, 34–35 age pyramid, 151, 152 Akerlof, George, 55 algorithmic discrimination, 189, 197–198 Alipay, 184, 293n17 allocation of retirement assets, 165–169, 257–259 AlphaGo Zero program, 43–44 alternative financial products
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
by Tim Wu · 4 Nov 2025 · 246pp · 65,143 words
. I suspect many people don’t buy Persian rugs or used cars precisely because they fear being cheated in one way or another. As economist George Akerlof theorized in a famous 1970 paper, that fear of being cheated or even defrauded can itself function to deter transactions, even if the product is
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Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Academic Association 1, no. 4 (2003). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Mark
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, 85 vs. users, competing interests between, 45, 52–53, 67–68 aerospace industry, 35 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 87 AI. See artificial intelligence Akerlof, George, 16 Alcoa, 28 AlexNet, 93 allegiance to brand, 72, 100–102 Altman, Sam, 6, 94, 142–43, 146, 151 Amazon, 6, 9, 10 AI development
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller · 1 Jan 2009 · 471pp · 97,152 words
HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DRIVES THE ECONOMY, AND WHY IT MATTERS FOR GLOBAL CAPITALISM With a new preface by the authors GEORGE A. AKERLOF AND ROBERT J. SHILLER Princeton University Press • PRINCETON AND OXFORD George Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley; co-director
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-14592-1 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Akerlof, George A., 1940– Animal spirits : how human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism / George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-691-14233-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1
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sure there is always a connection to economic reality. We both have sons who are emerging scholars and who have offered comments on the book. George Akerlof thanks the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the National Science Foundation (grant SES 04-17871) for generous financial support. We also thank Edward Koren
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–88). 7. Fehr and Gächter (2000). 8. Chen and Hauser (2005). 9. De Quervain et al. (2005). 10. E-mail communication from Ernest Fehr to George Akerlof, November 1, 2008. Fehr also pointed out that—since the dorsal striatum is activated in anticipation of both getting water, if one is thirsty, and
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-OFF BETWEEN INFLATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE LONG RUN? 1. Much of this chapter is based on Akerlof’s joint work with William Dickens and George Perry (Akerlof et al. 1996, 2000; Akerlof and Dickens 2007). See also Schultze (1959), Tobin (1972), and Palley (1994). 2. Samuelson (1997 [1948]). 3. Card and
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on Wage Rigidity and Unemployment: Sweden in the 1990s.” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 105(1): 15–29. Akerlof, George A., 1982. “Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 97(4):543–69. Akerlof, George A., and William T. Dickens. 2007. “Unfinished Business in the Macroeconomics of Low Inflation: A Tribute to
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George and Bill by Bill and George.” Brookings Papers on Macroeconomics 2:31–48. Akerlof, George A., and Rachel E. Kranton. 2000. “Economics and Identity.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115(3):715–53. ———. 2002. “Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the
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Economics of Organizations.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(1):9–32. ———. 2008. “Economics and Identity.” Unpublished paper, University of California-Berkeley, and Duke University, July. Akerlof, George A., and Paul M. Romer. 1993. “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2:1–74
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. Akerlof, George A., and Janet L. Yellen. 1990. “The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105(2):255–83. Akerlof, George A., Andrew K. Rose, and Janet L. Yellen. 1988. “Job Switching and Job Satisfaction
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in the U.S. Labor Market.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2:495–582. Akerlof, George A., William T. Dickens, and George L. Perry. 1996. “The Macroeconomics of Low Inflation.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1:1–59. ———. 2000. “Near-Rational
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, 164, 166 Agell, Jonas, 183n14 aggregate demand, 89, 173, 185n32 aggregate demand target, 96 aggregate supply, 185n32 agricultural land, 153 AIG. See American International Group Akerlof, George A., 11, 13, 25, 110, 113, 117, 124, 177n1, 181n10,2,5,8,9,13, 183n8, 188n1,2,10,11,14, 189n16,1, 190n8,10
Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy · 15 Jan 2012 · 342pp · 94,762 words
. But what if you are still putting off the decision a month later? Where is the line between good delay and bad delay? The economist George Akerlof was spending a year in India after graduate school, and his good friend and fellow economist Joseph Stiglitz visited him there. (This was decades ago
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, developed a clever mathematical model to show how procrastination can be in our best interests.17 A second strand of economics, the one originated by George Akerlof,18 laid the groundwork for Piers Steel and dozens of other prominent economists and psychologists who see procrastination as closely tied to impatience. Procrastination has
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of the books, websites, and self-help courses on the topic, there is no grand unified theory of procrastination.22 The closest we have is George Akerlof. In 1991, twenty-five years after his postgraduate year in India, Akerlof was invited to give a lecture at the 103rd meeting of the American
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mistaken about the benefits of doing so. Until recently, economists didn’t have a good model that captured the relationship between discount rates and procrastination. George Akerlof got them started, but even he wasn’t aware of some of the research about time inconsistency when he gave his 1991 procrastination talk to
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finished his essay on procrastination long before the one on the philosophy of language, and before he had completed the book orders.62 So, was George Akerlof really procrastinating, in the most negative sense of the term? I asked him how hard it would have been to send a box from India
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, the new commission was a controversial move. Sarkozy asked Stiglitz to chair the effort. Stiglitz had come a long way since waiting for his friend George Akerlof to send him a box of clothes from India. In 1979 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every other year to the top
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the information available to sellers and buyers. Akerlof’s most famous paper—one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of economics—is George A. Akerlof, “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84(3, 1970): 488–500. In this paper, Akerlof uses
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. 17. Carolyn Fischer, “Read This Paper Later: Procrastination with Time-Consistent Preferences,” Discussion Paper 99-19 (Resources for the Future, April 1999), p. 28. 18. George A. Akerlof, “Procrastination and Obedience,” American Economic Review 81(2, 1991): 1–19. 19. See Steel, The Procrastination Equation, p. 66. 20. See George Loewenstein, Scott
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and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: Intertemporal Choice,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3(1989): 181–193. 32. George Ainslie, Picoeconomics (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 33. George A. Akerlof, “Behavioral Microeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior,” Nobel Prize Lecture, December 8, 2001. 34. James E. Mazur, “Tests of an Equivalence Rule for Fixed and Variable Reinforcer
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, “Market Madness? The Case of Mad Money,” Management Science 58(2, 2012): 351–364. 2. See Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Crown Business, 2006); George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2010); Jason Zweig
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medulla, 69 Adrenaline, 69, 105 Advertising, 50, 55 fast food, 59–60 subliminal, 51, 52, 59 Affection, brain and, 124 Ainslie, George, 157, 158, 166 Akerlof, George, 147–148, 152, 153, 154–155, 233 procrastination and, 151, 158, 170–171 short-term decisions and, 155 Alda, Alan, 107 Algorithms, 21, 31, 44
EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody · 7 May 2018
left the IMF that I write a book explaining the euro crisis. He set me off on an amazing journey. My greatest debt is to George Akerlof. He understood what I wanted to write long before I did. Through many lunches over five years, he gave me an opportunity to talk about
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in early 1991 concluded, “One of the worst and sharpest depressions in European history had begun.”77 Two of the authors of that analysis were George Akerlof (who later received the Nobel Prize for Economics) and Janet Yellen (who became chairman of the Fed). They explained the unfolding disaster. At the unreasonably
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set by the 1:1 conversion of the Ostmark to the D-mark continued to undermine the competitiveness of East German firms, exactly as Professors George Akerlof and Janet Yellen had predicted (see c hapter 2). Hans-Werner Sinn, President of the Munich-based Ifo Institute for Economic Research and a prominent
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government transfers begin spending more, which creates additional incomes for others, thus activating a “multiplier effect” through a steadily widening circle of consumers and investors. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics, have noted that the mere knowledge that others have increased their spending creates a
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virtues of fiscal tightening had become integral to the eurozone’s culture. Indeed, austerity had become part of the eurozone’s identity. Economics Nobel laureate George Akerlof and Duke University economist Rachel Kranton explain that in a search for internal coherence and peer esteem, members of a group create rules or norms
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and Crisis, edited by Brian Murphy, Mary O’Rourke, and Noel Whelan, chapter 1. Kildare: Merrion. Kindle edition. Akerlof, George. 2007. “The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics.” American Economic Review 97, no. 1: 5–36. Akerlof, George, and Rachel Kranton. 2010. Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being. Princeton: Princeton
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University Press. Akerlof, George A., Andrew K. Rose, Janet L. Yellen, and Helga Hessenius. 1991. “East Germany In From the Cold: The Economic Aftermath of Currency Union.” Brookings Papers
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on Economic Activity 1: 1–87. Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. 2009. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, Robert
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Treaty of Paris, 27 support for EDC Treaty, 28 Aeschimann, Eric, 87 Africa, long-term decline in, 395 Ahern, Bertie, 179 AIB bank (Ireland), 271 Akerlof, George, 80–81, 147, 287, 290 Akerlof, Robert, 51–52 Aliber, Robert, 179–180, 182 Allen-Mills, Tony, 81 Allied Irish Bank (AIB), 180, 182, 227
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski · 24 Jun 2013 · 662pp · 180,546 words
through the eyes of others—neoliberal prescriptions par excellence (see Benabou and Tirole). Another economist we shall encounter later in our survey of crisis theories, George Akerlof, purported to concoct a neoclassical theory of identity by stuffing the utility function with even more arbitrary variables. This version of the “individual” seeks to
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Chicago School of neoclassical economics.” Far from being the conventional generic blanket disparagement of “freshwater economics” (such as that spread by Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, George Akerlof, and others), this points to the fact that Chicago was the prime initial incubator for modern finance theory, which has indeed provided direct intellectual inspiration
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in with op-eds essentially blaming the entire crisis on native cognitive weaknesses of market participants.37 This line became entrenched with the appearance of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: displaying an utter contempt for the history of economic thought, they “reduced” the message of Keynes’s General Theory
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be hard to find. The website also has a set of pages devoted to economics; under the rubric “Meet the Mavericks” it profiled Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, and Herman Daly. Kalle Lasn Associates has also published an anti-textbook entitled Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics which contains
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contributions by George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. At least the graphics were radical. Similar ideas were promoted in the curiously titled Occupy Handbook, which included chapters by Raghuram Rajan
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Fed?” SSRN working paper, 2011. Ailon, Galit. “The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals,” Qualitative Sociology 35 (2012): 251–70. Akerlof, George, and Rachel Kranton. Identity Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Akerlof, George, and Paul Romer. “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity no. 2 (1993): 1
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–73. Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. “Disputations: Our New Theory of Macroeconomics,” New Republic (2009), www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/disputations
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-our-new-theory-macroeconomics. Akerlof, George, and Joseph Stiglitz. “Let a Hundred Theories Bloom” (2009), www.project-synciate.org. Alterman, Eric. “The Professors, the Press, the Think Tanks—and Their Problems,”
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Association), AEI (American Enterprise Institute) “After the Crash of 2008” (Prasch), The Age of Uncertainty (PBS series) Agnotology, defined Agriculture, Department of AIG Financial Products Akerlof, George Allais, Maurice AlphaSimplex American Economic Review American Economics Association (AEA) American Enterprise Institute (AEI) American Finance Association American Institute of Certified Public Accountants American Majority
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy · 10 Nov 2009 · 545pp · 137,789 words
final concert before paying fans; across the water in Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton were founding the Black Panther Party. In nearby Berkeley, George Akerlof, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of MIT’s prestigious Ph.D. program in economics, was starting his teaching career. From early childhood, Akerlof had
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’t know very much and are, therefore, susceptible to peer pressure and other inchoate factors such as psychology. As every economics major knows, and as George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have recently reminded us, Keynes said that “animal spirits,” or the “spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,” play an important role
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administration, and published in The New York Times. The reason banks had been so reluctant to lend to the poor and underprivileged goes back to George Akerlof’s work on “lemons” in the secondhand car market. When the owner of a used car puts it up for sale, he signals to potential
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,” Science 162 (1968): 1244. 150 “Game theorists get . . .”: Binmore, Game Theory, 67. 12. HIDDEN INFORMATION AND THE MARKET FOR LEMONS 151 “I belonged to . . .”: From George Akerlof’s Nobel autobiography, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-autobio.html. 152 “a major reason as to why
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Market for Lemons’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/index.html. 153 “[M]ost cars traded . . .”: George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (1970): 489. 154 “was potentially an issue . . .”: Akerlof, “Writing ‘The
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) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Advanta Bank Corporation Affluent Society, The (Galbraith) Afghanistan War African Americans Age of Turbulence, The, (Greenspan) Air Force, U.S. Akerlof, George Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Alchian, Armen Alcoa, Inc. Allen, Frederick Lewis Allen, Linda Allende, Salvador Al Qaeda Alt-A bonds Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act (1982
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller · 14 Oct 2019 · 611pp · 130,419 words
of a train of thought that I have been developing over much of my life. It draws on work that I and my colleagues, notably George Akerlof, have done over decades,13 culminating in my presidential address, “Narrative Economics,” before the American Economic Association in 2017 and my Marshall Lectures at Cambridge
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way, often with modifications, into this book. This book is strongly influenced by two books I wrote with George Akerlof, Animal Spirits (2009) and Phishing for Phools (2015). Another strong influence is the book George Akerlof wrote with Rachel Kranton, Identity Economics (2011). Narratives play a role in all these books. Working with George
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want to survive in a highly competitive business where others use book jackets have had no choice, for the book jacket is part of what George Akerlof and I called a phishing equilibrium. In a competitive market in which competitors manipulate customers, and in which profit margins are competed away to normal
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-driven contagion is “the news”: the harvest of new information that news publishers hope will grab people’s attention on a given day. “Phools,” as George Akerlof and I call them, who do not think about the marketing efforts, are apt to think that events exogenously give us the news by jumping
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investor irrationality expected by other investors. In our 2009 book Animal Spirits, which was in many ways an expansion and elaboration of Keynes’s ideas, George Akerlof and I used the beauty contest metaphor to construct a theory of the emotional foundation of business fluctuations in general. The beauty contest metaphor also
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primitive brain system more connected to palpable emotions has its own heuristic for assessing risk.27 In joint work with William Goetzmann and Dasol Kim, George Akerlof and I examined data from a questionnaire survey of investors and high-income Americans since 1989. We found that people have exaggerated assessments of the
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depression. In ProQuest News & Newspapers, the peak mention occurred in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The fair wage-effort hypothesis, as presented by George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen (1990), asserts that workers are inclined to slow down their work in revenge if they feel that they are not being
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. In my view, they are interesting because they describe how bubbles or depressions can start from purely random causes, even if people are fairly sensible. George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen coined the term “near-rational” in 1985, and I wish that term had caught on more, that it had gone
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Macroeconomic Models: A Critical Review” (1978). I continued with “Stock Prices and Social Dynamics” (1984); Irrational Exuberance (first edition, 2000); and two books coauthored with George Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (2009), and Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and
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. 2013. Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture. New York: Riverhead Books, Penguin Group. Akerlof, George A. 2007. “The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics” (AEA Presidential Address). American Economic Review 97(1):3–36. Akerlof, George A., and Rachel Kranton. 2011. Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being
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. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. 2009. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
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Press. ________. 2015. Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, George A., and Janet L. Yellen. 1985. “A Near-Rational Model of the Business Cycle, with Wage and Price Inertia.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 100(1
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homeownership, 219–20; online searching of, x; phrase American Dream in, 154 affect heuristic, 67, 233 Aiden, Erez, 24 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 24 Akerlof, George, xviii, 61, 64, 67, 250, 300, 301n13 Aldrich-Vreeland Act, 117 Alexa, of Amazon Echo, 8, 207 Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, 207 Alice, Yandex, 207
The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
by William K. Black · 31 Mar 2005 · 432pp · 127,985 words
economists, but I am not dismissive of economics. Indeed, I write in large part to help build a new economic theory of fraud arising from George Akerlof’s classic theory of lemons markets (1970) and Henry Pontell’s work on “systems capacity” limitations in regulation that may increase the risk of waves
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to be cynical. James Pierce gave me the opportunity of a lifetime when he asked me to serve as his deputy and introduced me to George Akerlof. Both of you have been leading influences on my research, and your support has been critical. Kitty Calavita, Gil Geis, Paul Jesilow, and Henry Pontell
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on family law, was an inspiration and someone I could bounce ideas off. Travis Hale and Debra Moore gave me editing assistance. Henry Pontell and George Akerlof served as outside reviewers for the book, and their comments, along with those of Ed Kane, were of great use to me in improving the
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Act of 1981; law that reduced marginal income tax rates and boosted tax shelters. 1986 TAX REFORM ACT. Law that ended many abusive tax shelters. AKERLOF, GEORGE. Nobel prize-winning economist. AMBERG, RUTH. Bank Board counsel and my aide on FSLIC recap. AMERICAN SAVINGS. Largest S&L, victimized by fraud. ANDERSON, JACK
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Ring. 1990. The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Akerlof, George. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality, Uncertainty, and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3):488–500. Akerlof, George, and Paul M. Romer. 1993. “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” Brookings Papers on
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, 96, 107, 132, 134, 187, 189, 225, 248, 263, 285n7, 287nn14,15, 288n15 Adams, Jim Ring, 17 adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), 7, 30–31, 281n6 Akerlof, George, xvi, 248, 303n2 Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld (aka Akin, Gump), 65–66, 96, 270–274 Amberg, Ruth, 117, 132 Ambition and the Power, The
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan · 6 Jun 2016 · 252pp · 73,131 words
. If even those at the vanguard of tech commerce weren’t shopping online, what hope was there that everyone else ever would? Kicking the Tires George Akerlof never set out to create the intellectual framework that helped nurture the e-commerce explosion or transform the way economists devised their theories. In the
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her wares than the buyer does, the market is prone to collapse.) And all this can be traced back, in some small way, to young George Akerlof choosing to sit in on a topology class his first year at Harvard. Adverse Selection on eBay Despite his early doubts, Jeff Skoll did ultimately
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of genuine Tiffany and the buyers in search of them is to prove that they’re not just full of empty words. Around the time George Akerlof had finally gotten someone in the academic community to take “The Market for Lemons” seriously, Michael Spence was at the early stages of his PhD
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classic Economics text, even though the latter is fifty years older.11) Tirole’s Nobel is emblematic of the postwar trend in economics—begun by George Akerlof’s market for lemons paper and continued by the many applied theorists that followed—toward tailoring models to circumstance. As a result, it’s hard
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. The platform manager makes customer feedback possible, and in theory, the wisdom of crowds takes care of the rest, solving the asymmetric information problem that George Akerlof identified as the enemy of market function back in 1970. This has led to all sorts of match-making platforms for goods or services where
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we’re old-fashioned. We’ve also experienced market frictions of a more mundane variety. In writing this book we went to Washington to interview George Akerlof of market-for-lemons fame. As a bit of add-on market research, one of us, Ray, decided to rent an apartment for the night
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dirty (if invisible) fingers in all the right places to get the market to work just right, much more of the economy would look like George Akerlof’s used car market. Free-market extremists take any evidence of active design as a violation of market logic per se, a view that’s
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thank the following people who read the manuscript, or parts of it, or who graciously agreed to talk with us about ideas in the book: George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Pierre Azoulay, Seth Dicthick, Frank Dobbin, Ben Edelman, Teppo Felin, Ronald Findlay, Todd Fitch, Margo Beth Fleming, Walter Frick, Joshua Gans, Ed Glaeser
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has traditionally been more the domain of sociologists than economists, and one that we will not delve into in any detail in this book. 5. George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. 6. In a roundabout way
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–55, 57, 59 advertising, as money burning, 70–71 Super Bowl advertising, 70–71 AdWords, 14, 101 Airbnb, 3, 6, 50, 109, 125, 170–172 Akerlof, George, 43–51, 58–59, 64, 112 Alaskoil experiment, 55–57, 58–59 algebraic topology, 44–45 Amazon, 2, 3, 16, 50, 51, 52, 59, 74
Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller · 1 Jan 2012 · 288pp · 16,556 words
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller · 21 Sep 2015 · 274pp · 93,758 words
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler · 10 May 2015 · 500pp · 145,005 words
Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America
by Danielle Dimartino Booth · 14 Feb 2017 · 479pp · 113,510 words
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words
What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler · 15 Jul 2013 · 772pp · 203,182 words
Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm · 18 May 2022
Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay · 24 May 2004 · 436pp · 76 words
The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford · 15 Mar 2006 · 389pp · 98,487 words
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier · 4 Dec 2018 · 310pp · 85,995 words
The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World
by Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic · 5 Jan 2010 · 411pp · 108,119 words
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey · 15 Nov 2011 · 1,205pp · 308,891 words
Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi · 28 Dec 2017
Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It
by John Abramson · 15 Dec 2022 · 362pp · 97,473 words
The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards · 7 Apr 2014 · 466pp · 127,728 words
The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White · 24 Oct 2016 · 515pp · 142,354 words
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 10 Jun 2012 · 580pp · 168,476 words
Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle · 11 Oct 2021 · 305pp · 75,697 words
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver · 31 Aug 2012 · 829pp · 186,976 words
To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
by Daniel H. Pink · 1 Dec 2012 · 243pp · 61,237 words
The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It
by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig · 15 Feb 2013 · 726pp · 172,988 words
Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles
by William Quinn and John D. Turner · 5 Aug 2020 · 297pp · 108,353 words
Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght · 20 Mar 2017
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Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
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The Irrational Bundle
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Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
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In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic
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Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
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Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
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How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite
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Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy
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Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
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Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
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Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
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The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
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Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
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Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
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Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
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