Which 2001 economics laureate wrote the influential paper “The Market for Lemons”?

George A. Akerlof wrote the influential paper “The Market for Lemons” and shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Published in 1970, the paper examined markets in which sellers know more about product quality than buyers. Akerlof used the market for used cars to show how information asymmetry can cause buyers to lower their offers, driving high-quality sellers out of the market.

The remaining cars may then be disproportionately poor-quality vehicles, known in American slang as “lemons.” This mechanism became a foundational example of how unequal information can damage market outcomes.

Akerlof shared the 2001 prize with A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz for analyses of markets with asymmetric information. The paper’s title is often mistakenly associated only with consumer protection, but its broader subject is information economics.