Why are interest rates often excessively high on local lending markets in Third World countries? Why do people who want to buy a good used car turn to a dealer rather than a private seller? Why does a firm pay dividends even if they are taxed more heavily than capital gains? Why is it advantageous for insurance companies to offer clients a menu of contracts where higher deductibles can be exchanged for lower premiums? Why do rich landowners not bear the entire harvest risk in contracts with poor tenants? These questions exemplify familiar – but seemingly different – phenomena, each of which has posed a challenge to economic theory. This year's Laureates proposed a common explanation and extended the theory when they argumented the theory with the realistic assumption of asymmetric information: agents on one side of the market have much better information than those on the other side. Borrowers know more than the lender about their repayment prospects; the seller knows more than buyers about the quality of his car; the CEO and the board know more than the shareholders about the profitability of the firm; policyholders know more than the insurance company about their accident risk; and tenants know more than the landowner about their work effort and harvesting conditions.

More specifically, Akerlof showed that informational asymmetries can give rise to adverse selection on markets. Due to imperfect information on the part of lenders or prospective car buyers, borrowers with weak repayment prospects or sellers of low-quality cars crowd out everyone else from the market. Spence demonstrated that under certain conditions, well-informed agents can improve their market outcome by signaling their private information to poorly informed agents. The management of a firm can thus incur the additional tax cost of dividends to signal high profitability. Stiglitz showed that an uninformed agent can sometimes capture the information of a better-informed agent through screening, for example by providing choices from a menu of contracts for a particular transaction. Insurance companies are thus able to divide their clients into risk classes by offering different policies, where lower premiums can be exchanged for a higher deductible.

George Akerlof

Akerlof's 1970 essay, "The Market for Lemons" is the single most important study in the literature on economics of information. It has the typical features of a truly seminal contribution – it addresses a simple but profound and universal idea, with numerous implications and widespread applications.

Here Akerlof introduces the first formal analysis of markets with the informational problem known as adverse selection. He analyses a market for a good where the seller has more information than the buyer regarding the quality of the product. This is exemplified by the market for used cars; "a lemon" – a colloquialism for a defective old car – is now a well-known metaphor in economists' theoretical vocabulary. Akerlof shows that hypothetically, the information problem can either cause an entire market to collapse or contract it into an adverse selection of low-quality products.

Akerlof also pointed to the prevalence and importance of similar information asymmetries, especially in developing economies. One of his illustrative examples of adverse selection is drawn from credit markets in India in the 1960s, where local lenders charged interest rates that were twice as high as the rates in large cities. However, a middleman who borrows money in town and then lends it in the countryside, but does not know the borrowers' creditworthiness, risks attracting borrowers with poor repayment prospects, thereby becoming liable to heavy losses. Other examples in Akerlof's article include difficulties for the elderly to acquire individual health insurance and discrimination of minorities on the labor market.

A key insight in his "lemons paper" is that economic agents may have strong incentives to offset the adverse effects of information problems on market efficiency. Akerlof argues that many market institutions may be regarded as emerging from attempts to resolve problems due to asymmetric information. One such example is guarantees from car dealers; others include brands, chain stores, franchising and different types of contracts.

A timely example might further illustrate the idea that asymmetric information can generate adverse selection. At first, firms in a new sector – such as today's IT sector – might seem identical to an uninformed bystander, while some "insiders" may have better information about the future profitability of such firms. Firms with lower than average profitability will therefore be overvalued and more inclined to finance new projects by issuing their own shares than high-profitability firms which are undervalued by the market. As a result, low-profitability firms tend to grow more rapidly and the stock market will initially be dominated by "lemons". When uninformed investors eventually discover their mistake, share prices fall – the IT bubble bursts.

Apart from his research on asymmetric information, Akerlof has developed economic theory with insights from sociology and social anthropology. His most noteworthy contributions in this genre concern efficiency on labor markets. Akerlof points out that emotions such as reciprocity towards an employer or fairness towards colleagues can prompt wages to be set so high as to induce unemployment. He has also examined how social conventions such as the caste system may have unfavorable effects on economic efficiency. As a result of these studies, Akerlof's research is also well known and influential in other social sciences.