Nobel Prize Lecture

I was born during the second World War in Montclair New Jersey. This was more or less an accident (the location that is). My father was based in Ottawa as a member of the War Time Prices and Trades Board, the Canadian version of wartime price controls. That work entailed frequent trips to...

I was born on June 17, 1940 in New Haven, Connecticut. My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife. They had met ten years earlier at a departmental picnic when my mother had been a chemistry graduate student at Yale. My brother, Carl, was two years older. My father, who...

Interviewers are Professor Karl-Gustaf Lofgren and Anne-Sophie Crepin, graduate student, Umea University.

Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz's analyses form the core of modern information economics. Their work transformed the way economists think about the functioning of markets. The analytical methods they suggested have been applied to explain many social and economic institutions, especially different...

Scientific Background, The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2007. Economic transactions take place in markets, within firms and under a host of other institutional arrangements. Some markets are free of government intervention while others are regulated. Within firms, some transactions are...

Nobel Prize lecture.

I wrote "The Market for 'Lemons,'" (a 13-page paper for which I was awarded the Prize in Economics) during my first year as assistant professor at Berkeley, in 1966-67.* "Lemons" deals with a problem as old as markets themselves. It concerns how horse traders respond to the natural question: "if...

For more than two decades, the theory of markets with asymmetric information has been a vital and lively field of economic research. Today, models with imperfect information are indispensable instruments in the researcher's toolbox. Countless applications extend from traditional agricultural...

William S. Vickrey was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1914. His elementary and secondary education were in Europe and the United States, with graduation from Phillips Andover Academy in 1931. He received a B.S. in mathematics from Yale in 1935, followed by graduate work in economics at...