The Market for Lemons

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pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Unlike some other recipients of the prize, he hasn’t used his Nobel to secure guru status in politics or business, nor does he chase after high-paying gigs through consulting or corporate board appointments. He seems, to the best of our observation, content pondering big questions in the relaxed and unhurried manner that’s defined his career: when we e-mailed him to ask if he would talk to us about his classic paper on asymmetric information, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” he responded, “Sure, happy to talk whenever is good for you.”5 In explaining how he came to do the work that ultimately won him a Nobel Prize, the Berkeley economist recalled his experiences as a PhD student at MIT in the 1960s (in the economics department built by Paul Samuelson). He arrived at graduate school just as economists were starting to get past the extreme abstraction that had ruled the profession in earlier decades.

In Akerlof’s view, this was hard to reconcile with extended stretches that many Americans spend without a job, despite a willingness to do just about anything for pay.7 Lots of people do scan the want ads looking for something better than the burger-flipping or telemarketing opportunities that immediately present themselves. But this view of unemployment ignored many of the brutal job market realities experienced by the long-term unemployed that he felt a model should be able to explain. That’s what led him back to the market for lemons, which was a more satisfying framework for understanding why the labor market doesn’t work for so many people. (It wasn’t Akerlof’s last word on why the labor market falls so far short of the Arrow-Debreu ideal, but it was at least a model that he found to be a lot more satisfying than anything that preceded it.).

That same logic explains why, if you’re still single by the time you reach a certain age, it becomes harder and harder to convince a potential mate that there isn’t something wrong with you. And so, voilà, you have markets with lots of unsold used cars and lots of unemployed people desperate for a job at any wage. A New Economic Paradigm “The Market for ‘Lemons’” did more than just build the foundation for the field of information economics. It changed the way economists think about models. As we’ve seen, the lemons model doesn’t talk of buyers, sellers, capital, and labor as extreme abstractions, as Akerlof’s immediate predecessors had: there are cars and dealers and customers with money to spend in the used car market.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

.”: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 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 . . .”: George Akerlof, “Writing ‘The 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 Market for Lemons.’ ” 155 “marginally attached”: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Issues in Labor Statistics, Summary 90–04 (April 2009): 1. 156 “it is quite possible . . .”: Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’ ” 494. 157 2006 health care spending: “National Health Spending in 2006: A Year of Change for Prescription Drugs,” Health Affairs 27, no. 1 (2008): 14. 158 “The most obvious . . .”: Kenneth J.

.”: 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 Market for Lemons.’ ” 155 “marginally attached”: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Issues in Labor Statistics, Summary 90–04 (April 2009): 1. 156 “it is quite possible . . .”: Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’ ” 494. 157 2006 health care spending: “National Health Spending in 2006: A Year of Change for Prescription Drugs,” Health Affairs 27, no. 1 (2008): 14. 158 “The most obvious . . .”: Kenneth J. Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” American Economic Review 53, no. 5 (December 1963): 948. 158 “the cost of medical care . . .”: Ibid., 961. 158 “Insurance removes the incentive . . .”: Ibid., 962. 159 “really comes down to . . .”: Juan Dubra, “Interview with Kenneth Arrow,” Munich Personal Research Papers in Economics Archive, March 2005, 17, available at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/967/1/MPRA_paper_967.pdf. 161 Insurable deposit limits: In October 2008, during the turmoil on Wall Street, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation temporarily raised the limit from $100,000 to $250,000.

The Mathematics of Bliss 6. The Evangelist 7. The Coin-Tossing View of Finance 8. The Triumph of Utopian Economics PART TWO: REALITY-BASED ECONOMICS 9. The Prof and the Polar Bears 10. A Taxonomy of Failure 11. The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Rational Irrationality 12. Hidden Information and the Market for Lemons 13. Keynes’s Beauty Contest 14. The Rational Herd 15. Psychology Returns to Economics 16. Hyman Minsky and Ponzi Finance PART THREE: THE GREAT CRUNCH 17. Greenspan Shrugs 18. The Lure of Real Estate 19. The Subprime Chain 20. In the Alphabet Soup 21. A Matter of Incentives 22.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In the stock market, either side of a transaction could have information about the future value of the stock that is not known to the other side of the transaction (a feature that we ignored in our earlier discussion of the stock market). In all of these cases, uninformed traders need to form expectations about the value of the good being traded, and these expectations should take into account the behavior of better-informed traders. 22.6. THE MARKET FOR LEMONS 719 22.6 The Market for Lemons At the beginning of the chapter, we started with a simple scenario involving horse-racing and then showed how the resulting principles extended to much larger and more complex systems such as the stock market. For considering the role of asymmetric information, we’ll follow a similar strategy, first developing the case of the used-car market as a simple, stylized example, and then showing how the same principles apply to a range of more complex and fundamental markets.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 10.6 Advanced Material: A Proof of the Matching Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 10.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 11 Network Models of Markets with Intermediaries 319 11.1 Price-Setting in Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 11.2 A Model of Trade on Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 11.3 Equilibria in Trading Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 11.4 Further Equilibrium Phenomena: Auctions and Ripple Effects . . . . . . . . 334 11.5 Social Welfare in Trading Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 11.6 Trader Profits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 11.7 Reflections on Trade with Intermediaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 11.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 12 Bargaining and Power in Networks 347 12.1 Power in Social Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 12.2 Experimental Studies of Power and Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350 12.3 Results of Network Exchange Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 12.4 A Connection to Buyer-Seller Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356 12.5 Modeling Two-Person Interaction: The Nash Bargaining Solution . . . . . . 357 12.6 Modeling Two-Person Interaction: The Ultimatum Game . . . . . . . . . . . 360 12.7 Modeling Network Exchange: Stable Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 12.8 Modeling Network Exchange: Balanced Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 12.9 Advanced Material: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Bargaining . . . . . . . 369 12.10Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376 IV Information Networks and the World Wide Web 381 13 The Structure of the Web 383 13.1 The World Wide Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 13.2 Information Networks, Hypertext, and Associative Memory . . . . . . . . . . 386 13.3 The Web as a Directed Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 13.4 The Bow-Tie Structure of the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 13.5 The Emergence of Web 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 13.6 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 6 CONTENTS 14 Link Analysis and Web Search 405 14.1 Searching the Web: The Problem of Ranking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 14.2 Link Analysis using Hubs and Authorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 14.3 PageRank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414 14.4 Applying Link Analysis in Modern Web Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 14.5 Applications beyond the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 14.6 Advanced Material: Spectral Analysis, Random Walks, and Web Search . . . 425 14.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 15 Sponsored Search Markets 445 15.1 Advertising Tied to Search Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 15.2 Advertising as a Matching Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 448 15.3 Encouraging Truthful Bidding in Matching Markets: The VCG Principle . . 452 15.4 Analyzing the VCG Procedure: Truth-Telling as a Dominant Strategy . . . . 457 15.5 The Generalized Second Price Auction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460 15.6 Equilibria of the Generalized Second Price Auction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464 15.7 Ad Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 15.8 Complex Queries and Interactions Among Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 15.9 Advanced Material: VCG Prices and the Market-Clearing Property . . . . . 470 15.10Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 V Network Dynamics: Population Models 489 16 Information Cascades 491 16.1 Following the Crowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 16.2 A Simple Herding Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 16.3 Bayes’ Rule: A Model of Decision-Making Under Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . 497 16.4 Bayes’ Rule in the Herding Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502 16.5 A Simple, General Cascade Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504 16.6 Sequential Decision-Making and Cascades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508 16.7 Lessons from Cascades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 16.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 17 Network Effects 517 17.1 The Economy Without Network Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 17.2 The Economy with Network Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522 17.3 Stability, Instability, and Tipping Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 17.4 A Dynamic View of the Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527 17.5 Industries with Network Goods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534 17.6 Mixing Individual Effects with Population-Level Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . 536 17.7 Advanced Material: Negative Externalities and The El Farol Bar Problem . 541 17.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549 CONTENTS 7 18 Power Laws and Rich-Get-Richer Phenomena 553 18.1 Popularity as a Network Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 18.2 Power Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555 18.3 Rich-Get-Richer Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557 18.4 The Unpredictability of Rich-Get-Richer Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559 18.5 The Long Tail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561 18.6 The Effect of Search Tools and Recommendation Systems . . . . . . . . . . . 564 18.7 Advanced Material: Analysis of Rich-Get-Richer Processes . . . . . . . . . . 565 18.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 VI Network Dynamics: Structural Models 571 19 Cascading Behavior in Networks 573 19.1 Diffusion in Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 19.2 Modeling Diffusion through a Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 19.3 Cascades and Clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583 19.4 Diffusion, Thresholds, and the Role of Weak Ties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588 19.5 Extensions of the Basic Cascade Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 590 19.6 Knowledge, Thresholds, and Collective Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 19.7 Advanced Material: The Cascade Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 19.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 20 The Small-World Phenomenon 621 20.1 Six Degrees of Separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621 20.2 Structure and Randomness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 622 20.3 Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 626 20.4 Modeling the Process of Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629 20.5 Empirical Analysis and Generalized Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632 20.6 Core-Periphery Structures and Difficulties in Decentralized Search . . . . . . 638 20.7 Advanced Material: Analysis of Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . 640 20.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 652 21 Epidemics 655 21.1 Diseases and the Networks that Transmit Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655 21.2 Branching Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 21.3 The SIR Epidemic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 660 21.4 The SIS Epidemic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 666 21.5 Synchronization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 669 21.6 Transient Contacts and the Dangers of Concurrency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672 21.7 Genealogy, Genetic Inheritance, and Mitochondrial Eve . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 21.8 Advanced Material: Analysis of Branching and Coalescent Processes . . . . . 682 21.9 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695 8 CONTENTS VII Institutions and Aggregate Behavior 699 22 Markets and Information 701 22.1 Markets with Exogenous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702 22.2 Horse Races, Betting, and Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704 22.3 Aggregate Beliefs and the “Wisdom of Crowds” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 710 22.4 Prediction Markets and Stock Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714 22.5 Markets with Endogenous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717 22.6 The Market for Lemons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719 22.7 Asymmetric Information in Other Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 724 22.8 Signaling Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 728 22.9 Quality Uncertainty On-Line: Reputation Systems and Other Mechanisms . 729 22.10Advanced Material: Wealth Dynamics in Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732 22.11Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 740 23 Voting 745 23.1 Voting for Group Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745 23.2 Individual Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747 23.3 Voting Systems: Majority Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 23.4 Voting Systems: Positional Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 23.5 Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 758 23.6 Single-Peaked Preferences and the Median Voter Theorem . . . . . . . . . . 760 23.7 Voting as a Form of Information Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766 23.8 Insincere Voting for Information Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 23.9 Jury Decisions and the Unanimity Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 771 23.10Sequential Voting and the Relation to Information Cascades . . . . . . . . . 776 23.11Advanced Material: A Proof of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem . . . . . . . . 777 23.12Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 24 Property Rights 785 24.1 Externalities and the Coase Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 785 24.2 The Tragedy of the Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 790 24.3 Intellectual Property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 24.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 796 Chapter 1 Overview Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society.

In focusing first on used cars, we’re following the rhetorical lead of the economist George Akerlof, who published a foundational paper on asymmetric information [10] for which he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. His leading example in the paper was the market for used cars — or, as he called it, the “market for lemons.” (A used car that is particularly bad is called a lemon.) The idea behind this phrase is old, probably as old as trading itself, but Akerlof was the first to clearly articulate the underlying principle and its implications for how markets work — or, in some cases, how they fail to work. Once we develop the basic ideas for the example of the used car market, we will then discuss how to apply these ideas to other markets.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Instead, in this new style, the economic model is customized to describe the salient features of reality that describe the special problem under consideration. Perfect competition is only one model among many, although itself an interesting special case. Since the ‘Market for “Lemons”’ [the research that won Akerlof his Nobel Prize] was an early paper in this new style of economics, its origins and history are a saga in that change.” Akerlof, “Writing the ‘The Market for “Lemons”’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay” (2001 Nobel Prize lecture), http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook_page. ‡‡ This is the famous Israeli day care center experiment reported in Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” Journal of Legal Studies 29, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–17.

Economists Agree the Stimulus Lifted the Economy” (Wolfers), 135n “When Economics Students Rebel” (Wren-Lewis), 197n White, Harry Dexter, 1–2 white flight, segregation and, 42 “Why We Learn Nothing from Regressing Economic Growth on Policies” (Rodrik), 35n Wicksell, Knut, 119 Williamson, John, 159–60 Wolfers, Justin, 135n World Bank, 1n, 2, 87 Washington Consensus and, 160 World War II, 2n, 108, 165 Wren-Lewis, Simon, 197n, 198 “Writing ‘The Market for “Lemons”‘: A Personal and Interpretive Essay” (Akerlof), 69n W. W. Norton, xiv–xv Wylie, Andrew, xiv Yale University, 103, 107, 109 ALSO BY DANI RODRIK The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth Has Globalization Gone Too Far?


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “The ‘White Coat’ Economy of Massachusetts,” Boston Globe, May 9, 2006; Derek Thompson, “America 2020: Health Care Nation,” Atlantic, August 17, 2010, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/america-2020-health-care-nation/61647/. CHAPTER 3. FROM CAVEAT EMPTOR TO CAVEAT VENDITOR 1. George A. Akerlof, “Writing ‘The Market for “Lemons’”: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html. 2. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500. 3. Ibid, 489. 4. Joe Girard with Stanley H. Brown, How to Sell Anything to Anybody (New York: Fireside, 2006; 1977), 6. 5.

The first two academic journals where young Akerlof submitted his paper rejected it because they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality.”1 The third journal also turned down Akerlof’s study, but on different grounds. Its reviewers didn’t say his analysis was trivial; they said it was mistaken. Finally, two years after he’d completed the paper, The Quarterly Journal of Economics accepted it and in 1970 published “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Akerlof’s article went on to become one of the most cited economics papers of the last fifty years. In 2001, it earned him a Nobel Prize. In the paper, Akerlof identified a weakness in traditional economic reasoning. Most analyses in economics began by assuming that the parties to any transaction were fully informed actors making rational decisions in their own self-interest.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Changes in Taxi Ridership and Revenue in Los Angeles 2009–2014,” Policy Brief, July 2015, table 1, p. 3, http://www.irle.ucla.edu/publications/documents/Taxi-Policy-Brief.pdf. 201 Yellow Cab Cooperative, filed for bankruptcy: Tom Corrigan, “San Francisco’s Biggest Taxi Operator Seeks Bankruptcy Protection,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-biggest-taxi-operator-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-1453677177. 201 Less than three years later: Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, “The Struggles of New York City’s Taxi King,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 27, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-taxi-medallion-king. 202 Lawmakers in France: “Uber Fined in France over UberPop,” BBC News, June 9, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36491926. 202 In June 2015 the Economist: “Why Fintech Won’t Kill Banks,” Economist, June 17, 2015, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/06/economist-explains-12. 202 “a future as a sort of financial utility”: Ibid. 203 $45 billion: Juro Osawa, Gillian Wong, and Rick Carew, “Xiaomi Becomes World’s Most Valuable Tech Startup,” Wall Street Journal, last modified December 29, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/xiaomi-becomes-worlds-most-valuable-tech-startup-1419843430. 203 Xiaomi had sold 61 million smartphones: Eva Dou, “China’s Xiaomi under Pressure to Prove Value to Investors,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xiaomi-under-pressure-to-prove-value-to-investors-1452454204. 203 typically selling for $149 in 2015: Eva Dou, “Xiaomi Ends 2015 as China’s Smartphone King,” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/02/01/xiaomi-ends-2015-as-chinas-smartphone-king. 203 less than 5% of revenue: Kevin Kelleher, “Once a Darling, Xiaomi Is Facing Tough Questions about Its Future,” Time, March 21, 2016, http://time.com/4265943/xiaomi-slowdown. 203 Xiaomi’s sales had dropped by almost 40%: David Gilbert, “How Xiaomi Lost $40bn: Where It All Went Wrong for the ‘Apple of the East,’ ” International Business Times, August 18, 2016, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/how-xiaomi-lost-40bn-where-it-all-went-wrong-apple-east-1576781. 203 closer to $3.6 billion: Ibid. 204 Total unit sales in 2016: James Titcomb, “Samsung Mobile Phone Sales Fall to Lowest Level in Five Years,” Telegraph, January 24, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/01/24/samsung-mobile-phone-sales-fall-lowest-level-five-years. 204 Apple captured 91% of global smartphone profits: Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “How Apple Sucks the Profit Out of Mobile Phones,” Fortune, February 14, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/02/14/apple-mobile-profit-2015. 204 analyst Tim Long of BMO Capital Markets estimated: Mikey Campbell, “Apple Captures More than 103% of Smartphone Profits in Q3 despite Shrinking Shipments,” November 3, 2016, http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/03/apple-captures-more-than-103-of-smartphone-profits-in-q3-despite-shrinking-shipments. 204 $22 billion in profits: Joel Rosenblatt and Jack Clark, “Google’s Android Generates $31 Billion Revenue, Oracle Says,” Bloomberg, January 21, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt. 207 “The Market for ‘Lemons’ ”: George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500, https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431. 207 “did not publish papers”: George A. Akerlof, “Writing the ‘The Market for “Lemons”’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” Nobelprize.org, November 14, 2003, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html. 207 “if this paper were correct”: Ibid. 207 50 million rides per month: Eric Newcomer, “Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth,” Bloomberg, last modified April 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/lyft-is-gaining-on-uber-as-it-spends-big-for-growth. 208 In 2013, California passed regulations: Tomio Geron, “California Becomes First State to Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX,” Forbes, September 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/19/california-becomes-first-state-to-regulate-ridesharing-services-lyft-sidecar-uberx/#6b22c10967fe. 208 by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them: BlaBlaCar, “Frequently Asked Questions: Is It Safe for Me to Enter My Govt.

This is a shame, because at least some of the passed-up deals actually would have been advantageous for both parties. Knowledge differentials, unfortunately, kept these transactions from happening. The idea that such “information asymmetries” are harmful not just for the less informed party but also for markets overall was formalized by economist George Akerlof in his classic 1970 paper “The Market for ‘Lemons.’ ” Akerlof showed that the used-car market could suffer greatly because of the existence of “lemons”‡—apparently fine cars that, in fact, had bad mechanical problems. Sellers know which cars are lemons but most buyers don’t, and this information asymmetry will keep the used-car market small and inefficient unless it’s addressed by, for example, having dealers offer money-back guarantees to customers who feel that they’ve been cheated.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

. : This analysis is based on data and reporting in Buttonwood, “The Real Deal—Low Real Interest Rates Are Usually Bad News for Equity Markets,” Economist, October 20, 2012, http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21564845-low-real-interest-rates-are-usually-bad-news-equity-markets. “The Market for ‘Lemons’”: George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970), pp. 488–500. “Irreversibility, Uncertainty . . .”: Ben S. Bernanke, “Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Cyclical Investment,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., July 1980, http://www.nber.org/papers/w502.

The policy debate over forward guidance as an adjunct to market manipulation is a continuation of one of the most long-standing areas of intellectual inquiry in modern economics. This inquiry involves imperfect information or information asymmetry: a situation in which one party has superior information to another that induces suboptimal behavior by both parties. This field took flight with a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” that chose used car sales as an example to make its point. Akerlof was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 in part for this work. The seller of a used car, he states, knows perfectly well whether the car runs smoothly or is of poor quality, a “lemon.” The buyer does not know; hence an information asymmetry arises between buyer and seller.

Author Jonah Goldberg has documented fascism’s history . . . : Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2008). More ominous was his remark . . . : Quoted in Balko, Warrior Cop, p. 333. SELECTED SOURCES ARTICLES Akerlof, George A. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970), pp. 488–500. Alderman, Liz. “Under Chinese, a Greek Port Thrives.” New York Times, October 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/chinese-company-sets-new-rhythm-in-port-of-piraeus.html.


pages: 263 words: 75,610

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, full text search, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, information trail, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Joi Ito, lifelogging, moveable type in China, Network effects, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, power law, RFID, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, The Market for Lemons, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Vannevar Bush, Yochai Benkler

This rests on the view that where information asymmetries persist, markets could become inefficient. Buyers could end up with low-quality goods they paid too high a price for—an inefficient allocation of resources. And if buying again, they may choose a good with the lowest price, knowing they do not know quality (see Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” 488–500). Or market participants could hide some of their qualities to obtain a good or service at a price they otherwise would not be able to. Third, market participants could hide their intention to change their behavior when it is the basis of the transaction (think of a person who begins to drive recklessly after having taken out comprehensive car insurance).

Bibliography Agre, Phil and Marc Rotenberg, eds. Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1997. Aimone, James B., Janet Wiles, and Fred H. Gage. “Computational Influence of Adult Neurogenesis on Memory Encoding.” Neuron 61 (2009): 187–202. Akerlof, George A. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (1970): 488–500. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. rev. ed. London: Verso. 1991. Anderson, J. R. and L. J. Schooler. “Reflections of the Environment in Memory.” Psychological Science 2 (1991): 396–408.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

As a result, honest sellers (unable to show that they are honest) would have trouble getting a good price for their goods, driving some of them out of the market—a decision that leaves the market overpopulated with dishonest sellers, which further erodes buyers’ trust and prices and so on in a vicious cycle called “adverse selection.”26 The original paper about adverse selection, “The Market for Lemons,” dealt with the case of used cars, but the phenomenon is so pervasive, rearing its head in important markets like those for insurance, that the economist behind the lemons model, George Akerlof, eventually earned a Nobel Prize for this insight.27 The lemons problem explains why middlemen so often appear in markets for used goods: they not only have the expertise to judge quality, but they can vouch for it with their reputation.

Cannon, “An Examination of the Nature of Trust in Buyer-Seller Relationships,” Journal of Marketing 61, no. 2 (April 1997): 35–51. 26.In insurance contexts, the vicious cycle is sometimes called the death spiral. See David M. Cutler and Richard J. Zeckhauser, “Adverse Selection in Health Insurance,” Forum for Health Economics & Policy (1998). 27.George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500. 28.Joel Grover and Matt Goldberg, “False Claims, Lies Caught on Tape at Farmers Markets,” NBC Los Angeles, September 23, 2010. 29.Shoshana Walter, “Farm Fakes: A History of Fraudulent Food,” Modern Farmer, May 3, 2013. 30.Specifically, the bill created a way for the markets to tax vendors at farmers’ markets to fund these outside inspectors.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

For an informed discussion of the client state problem, see Tony Judt’s Post War: A History of Europe since 1945 (William Heinemann, London, 2005). 8. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776. As it turned out, this was a remarkably auspicious year for political and economic developments. 9. See, for example, ‘The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism’, the groundbreaking paper by George A. Akerlof, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84.3 (1970), pp. 488–500. 10. For an interesting modern discussion of the role of ‘good government’, see Timothy Besley’s ‘ ‘Principled Agents?’ The Political Economy of Good Government’, The Lindahl Lectures (Oxford, 2006).

The classic modern-day texts on these issues include John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971) and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Aherne, A., Gagnon, J., Haltmaier, J. and Kamin, S., Preventing Deflation: Lessons from Japan’s Experience in the 1990s, Federal Reserve International Finance Discussion Paper, Washington DC, 2002 Akerlof, G., ‘The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84.3 (1970), pp. 488–500 Balassa, B., ‘The purchasing power doctrine: a reappraisal’, Journal of Political Economy, 72 (1964), pp. 584–96 Barbone, L., Bontch-Osmolovssky, M. and Zaidi, S., The Foreign-born Population in the European Union and its Contribution to National Tax and Benefit Systems, World Bank, Washington, DC, April 2009 Baumol, W., Litan, R. and Schramm, C., Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007 Bernanke, B., The Great Moderation, Federal Reserve, Washington DC, 2004 ———, The Global Savings Glut, Federal Reserve, Washington DC, 2005 Besley, T., ‘Principled Agents?


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

King, The End of Alchemy: Money, banking and the future of the global economy, Little, Brown, London, 2016. 13.Sherman McCoy, the protagonist in Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, is a Wall Street trader whose life goes horribly wrong just when it seemed to be going so well: he was a self-styled Master of the Universe. 14.For a discussion of the effects of dysfunctional belief systems, see R. Hausmann, ‘Through the Venezuelan looking glass’, Project Syndicate, August 2016, available at: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/venezuela-destructive-belief-systems-by-ricardo-hausmann-2016-08 15.The classic article on asymmetric information is George Akerlof, ‘The market for lemons: Quality, uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84:3 (1970), pp. 488–500. 16.See, for example, E. Passari and H. Rey, Financial Flows and the International Monetary System, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 21172, Cambridge, MA, May 2015. 17.The pre-2000 figures come from M.

The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s wrong with banking and what to do about it, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013 Ahmed, S., M. Appendino and M. Ruta. Depreciations without Exports? Global value chains and the exchange rate elasticity of exports, Policy Research Working Paper No. 7390, World Bank, Washington, DC, August 2015 Akerlof, G. ‘The market for lemons: Quality, uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84:3 (1970), pp. 488–500 Alesina, A., A. Devleeschauwer, W. Easterly, S. Kurlat and R. Wacziarg. Fractionalization, Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 1959, Cambridge, MA, June 2002, available at: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4553003 Andrews, D., C.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Krugman, End This Depression Now!. 22. Source: OECD Economic Outlook 2012. 23. P. Krugman, ‘Dubya's Double Dip?’, New York Times, 2 Aug. 2002, at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html (accessed Jan. 2013). CHAPTER 6: LOSS OF TRUST, LOSS OF GROWTH 1. G. Akerlof, ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84.3 (Aug. 1970): 488–500. 2. J. Wood and P. Berg, ‘Rebuilding Trust in Banks’, Gallup Business Journal, at http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/148049/rebuilding-trust-banks.aspx#2 (accessed Jan. 2013). 3.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown, New York, 2012 Ahamad, L. Lords of Finance, Random House, New York, 2009 Aherne, A., Gagnon, J., Haltmaier, J. and Kamin, S. ‘Preventing Deflation: Lessons from Japan's Experience in the 1990s’, Federal Reserve International Finance Discussion Paper, Washington, DC, 2002 Akerlof, G. ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84.3 (Aug. 1970): 488–500 ‘A Makeshift Budget’, The Times, 28 Apr. 1931 ‘An Emergency Budget’, The Times, 11 Sept. 1931 Arrow. K. J. The Limits of Organization, The Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis, Norton, New York, 1974 Bacon, J.


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A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Another way to put it is to say that a society is in a state of Pareto optimality if no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. 7. In Akerlof’s classic example of ‘the market for lemons’, given the difficulty of ascertaining the quality of used cars before purchase, prospective buyers will not be willing to stump up good money even for what is a truly good second-hand car. Given this, owners of good used cars will shun the market, lowering the average quality of cars further, leading, in the extreme case, to the disappearance of the market itself. See G. Akerlof, ‘The market for “lemons”: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 84, no. 4 (1970). 8.


State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

In any event, the art of state-building will be a key component of national power, as important as the ability to deploy traditional military force to the maintenance of world order. bibliography Akerlof, George A. 1982. “Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 47(4): 543–69. ——. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84: 488–500. Alchian, Armen A. 1950. “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58: 211–21. Alchian, Armen A., and Demsetz, H. 1972. “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review 62(5): 777–95.


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Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

., 1994, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (originally published 1935), London, University of California Press, p. 109. 3: Intermediation 1. McCardie, J., Armstrong v. Jackson (1917) 2KB 822. 2. George Akerlof employed the used car market as an example to highlight how markets can break down when information asymmetry is present in his classic 1970 article: Akerlof, G.A., 1970, ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84 (3), pp. 488–500. 3. Shiller, R.J., 1981, ‘Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?’, The American Economic Review, 71 (3), June, pp. 421–36. 4. Kay, J., 2012, ‘The Kay Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision Making’, Final Report, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/253454/bis-12–917-kay-review-of-equity-markets-final-report.pdf. 5.

., 1995, Risk: The Policy Implications of Risk Compensation and Plural Rationalities, London, Routledge. Adams, R.McC., 1981, Heartland of Cities, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Admati, A.R., and Hellwig, M.F., 2013, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press. Akerlof, G.A., 1970, ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84 (3), pp. 488–500. Albert, M., 1993, Capitalisme contre capitalisme, Paris, Seuil; trans. P. Haviland as Capitalism vs Capitalism, London, Whurr Publishers. Americans for Financial Reform, 2014, 11 December, http://ourfinancialsecurity.org/#.


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Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

(Have you ever bought a used car?) But if the imbalance, or asymmetry of information, becomes too large, then markets can break down entirely. This was the fundamental insight of 2001 Nobel laureate George Akerlof, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. His paper entitled “The Market for Lemons” used the used-car market to make its central point. Any individual selling a used car knows more about its quality than someone looking to buy it. This creates an adverse selection problem, just as it did with the Hope Scholarships. Car owners who are happy with their vehicles are less likely to sell them.

In theory, the market for high-quality used cars will not work, much to the detriment of anyone who may want to buy or sell such a car. (In practice, such markets often do work for reasons explained by the gentlemen with whom Mr. Akerlof shared his Nobel prize; more on that in a moment.) “The Market for Lemons” is characteristic of the kinds of ideas recognized by the Nobel committee. It is, in the words of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “a simple but profound and universal idea, with numerous implications and widespread applications.” Health care, for example, is plagued with information problems.


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Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 49–81. a lemons market George Akerlof (1970), “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 83:488–500. George E. Hoffer and Michael D. Pratt (1987), “Used Vehicles, Lemons Markets, and Used Car Rules: Some Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Consumer Policy, 10:409–14. Steven E. Kaplan, Pamela B. Roush, and Linda Thorne (2007), “Andersen and the Market for Lemons in Audit Reports,” Journal of Business Ethics, 70:363–73. Globalization is making Rick Mullin (2011), “Shock to the System: Big Questions About Drug Safety Arise in the Wake of Rampant Supply-Chain Globalization,” Chemical & Engineering News, 89:11–20.


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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

The insurer would sensibly raise the premium to match the characteristics of those who want policies. But this makes divorce insurance attractive only to those whose marriages are truly on the rocks. The cautious insurer must raise the premium still further. A divorce insurance market would be like the market for lemons. As in the wallet auction, there is no price at which a seller would wish to sell at which a buyer would wish to buy. So no market can exist, and there are no markets in divorce insurance. Divorce is extreme: the gap in knowledge between the potential insurer and the insured is insurmountable.

I have written books on the tax and benefit system (Dilnot, Kay, and Morris [1984]; Kay and King [1990]), and while I don't now hold all the views I did then, I still urge the reader to read (or better still buy) them. 7. See chapter 7, note 14. 8. See Easterly (200 1) for a discussion of some of the issues. {bibliography} • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Adams,]. 1995. Risk. London: UCL Press. Akerlof, G. A. 1970. "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." Quarterly Journal ofEconomics 84 (August): 488-500. ---. 1984. An Economic Theorist's Book ofTales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ---. 2001. Behavioural Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behaviour. Nobel Prize Lecture, Stockholm. Albert, M. 1990.


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The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Haldane, Brennan and Madouros, Figure 19. 27. See Independent Commission on Banking, Fig. 5.5, and Ben Broadbent, ‘Deleveraging’, 15 March 2012, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/speech553.pdf, Figure 3. 28. Broadbent, ‘Deleveraging’, p. 4. 29. George Akerloff, ‘The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 84, no. 3 (1970), pp. 488–500. 30. Derivative transactions include a variety of financial contracts, including structured debt obligations, swaps, futures, options, caps, floors, collars, forwards, and various combinations of these.

‘The World our Grandchildren will Inherit: The Rights Revolution and Beyond’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 17994, April 2012. www.nber.org. Admati, Anat and Martin Hellwig. The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Ahamed, Liaquat. Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World (New York: Penguin, 2009). Akerloff, George. ‘The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 84, no. 3 (1970), pp. 488–500. Alesina, Alberto and Silvia Ardagna. ‘Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes versus Spending’, Tax Policy and the Economy, vol. 24 (2010), ed. Jeffrey R. Brown (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research). http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11970.pdf?


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Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Knowing that, anyone who can get a recommendation would rather wait to get it (maybe some connection to a prospective employer will emerge; maybe a friend will start a business), and only those who know no one will ever recommend them (perhaps because they are actually not good workers) will go around knocking at doors to find a job. But then the employer would be right in refusing to talk to them. The market in this situation is unraveling. In 1970, George Akerlof, another future Nobel laureate, but then just a fresh PhD, wrote a paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” in which he argued that the market for used cars might just shut down because people have an incentive to sell off their worst cars. That sets off the kind of self-confirming reasoning we saw in the case of newcomers to the labor market; the more suspicious buyers become of the old cars being sold, the less they will want to pay for them.50 The problem is the less they want to pay, the more the owners of good used cars will want to hold on to them (or sell their cars to friends who know and trust them).

Stiglitz, “Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device,” American Economic Review 74, no. 3 (June 1984): 433–44. 45 Emily Breza, Supreet Kaur, and Yogita Shamdasani, “The Morale Effects of Pay Inequality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 611–63. 46 Dustmann, Schönberg, and Stuhler, “Labor Supply Shocks, Native Wages, and the Adjustment of Local Employment.” 47 Patricia Cortés and Jessica Pan, “Foreign Nurse Importation and Native Nurse Displacement,” Journal of Health Economics 37 (2017): 164–80. 48 Kaivan Munshi, “Networks in the Modern Economy: Mexican Migrants in the U.S. Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 2 (2003): 549–99. 49 Lori Beaman, “Social Networks and the Dynamics of Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Refugees Resettled in the U.S.,” Review of Economic Studies 79, no. 1 (January 2012): 128–61. 50 George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. 51 Referees and editors apparently found Akerlof’s paper difficult to understand. Essentially, the kind of circular reasoning that explains the unraveling requires a proper mathematical exposition to make sure it is watertight, and in 1970 this particular style of mathematical argumentation was unfamiliar to most economists.


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The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

See Hellwig (2009) and the references given there, as well as Acharya et al. (forthcoming). 30. Any potential buyer of the loan would fear that the bank might be selling bad loans while keeping good ones. This is an example of what is known in economics as a “lemons problem,” after Akerlof’s (1970) Nobel Prize–winning analysis of what he called the market for “lemons.” Akerlof (1970) shows that markets in which sellers have better information than buyers may work very differently from ordinary markets. For example, in the market for used cars, potential buyers might require large discounts in compensation for the risk that sellers might be hiding important information about their cars and about their reasons for selling them.

Ahamed, Liaquat. 2009. Lords of Finance. New York: Penguin. Aiyar, Shekhar, Charles W. Calomiris, and Tomasz Wieladek. 2012. “Does Macro-Pru Leak? Evidence from a UK Policy Experiment.” NBER Working Paper 17822. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3): 488–500. Akerlof, George A., and Paul M. Romer. 1993. “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1993 (2): 1–73. Alesina, Alberto, and Lawrence J.


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

American Economic Review 53, no. 5 (June 1963): 941–73; Pauly, Mark V. “The Economics of Moral Hazard: Comment.” American Economic Review, part 1, 58, no. 3 (June 1968): 531–37; Arrow, Kenneth J. “The Economics of Moral Hazard: Further Comment.” American Economic Review, part 1, 58, no. 3 (June 1968): 537–39; Akerlof, George A. “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500; Holmstrom, Bengt. “Moral Hazard and Observability.” Bell Journal of Economics 10, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 74–91; and Grossman, Sanford J., and Oliver D. Hart. “An Analysis of the Principal-Agent Problem.”


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

The existence of quantum information theory, however, does not invalidate the claim that classical information is a concept that works at a range of scales that is unusual for other theories. 4. Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–530. 5. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. 6. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 8. 7. Ibid., 31. 8. The formula for Boltzmann’s entropy (SB) is SB = kB ln(W) where kB is Boltzmann’s constant, which has units of energy over temperature, and W is the number of microstates corresponding to a given macrostate.


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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

But TV has also spawned an age of reality shows in which Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump can overwhelm any cultural innovation that might exist. 8. In 1970 the Nobel Prize–winning economist George Akerlof published a paper that may help us understand the effect that the commoditization of media by Facebook, YouTube, and Google is having on our culture. The paper was called “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Akerlof says that when you buy a used car you assume the worst—it’s a lemon—in your negotiation stance. Thus the seller of a really good used car always loses out. No one will pay for more than average quality. The typical consumer of ad-supported media in our broadband universe is like that used-car buyer: he or she assumes that content is of average quality, and this inevitably gives rise to what Chris Anderson, in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, claims is a business strategy essential to companies’ survival—giving things away.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

CHAPTER 3: MARKETS AND MONEY market volatility plummeted: Robert Jensen, “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (August 2007), 879–924, https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/122/3/879/1879540/The-Digital-Provide-Information-Technology-Market. “The market is essentially an ordering mechanism”: Friedrich August von Hayek, “Coping with Ignorance,” Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, July 1978. the market for used cars: George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970), 488–500, http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/84/3/488.short. fewer peaches are offered for sale: Information asymmetries can also cause sellers to lose out when they undervalue their goods and services and a more informed buyer takes advantage of it.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

‘Conditional Cash Transfers and Their Impact on Child Work and Schooling: Evidence from the PROGRESA Program in Mexico’, Economía, Vol. 2 (1): 45–96. Solow, Robert (1985). ‘Economic History and Economics’, American Economic Review, Vol. 75 (2): 328–31. Chapter 6 Akerlof, George (1970). ‘The Market for Lemons: Quality, Uncertainty, and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84 (3): 488–500. Akerlof, George and Shiller, Robert (2015). Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anderson, Jenny (2011). Economists in Love: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, It’s not you, it’s the dishes.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Following an update in the spring of 2017, the relevant description can now be found in clause 3: The Services comprise mobile applications and related services (each, an ‘Application’), which enable users to arrange and schedule transportation, logistics and/or delivery services and/or to purchase certain goods, including with third party providers of such services and goods under agreement with Uber or certain of Uber’s affiliates (‘Third Party Providers’). 10. George Akerlof, ‘The market for “lemons”: qualitative uncertainty and the market mechanism’ (1970) 84(3) Quarterly Journal of Economics 488. 11. Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (O/R Books 2015). 12. Ibid., 100–1. 13. Ibid. This is confirmed by internal Uber documents, which suggest that, in 2014, fewer than 3 per cent of drivers were ‘at risk of being deactivated’ as a result of a rating below 4.6 stars (out of 5): James Cook, ‘Uber’s internal charts show how its driver-rating system actually works’, Business Insider UK (11 February 2015), http://uk.businessinsider.com/leaked-charts-show-how-ubers- driver-rating-system-works-2015–2, archived at https://perma.cc/5UPM-SWFN.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Without a sufficient level of trust, perceived risks may outweigh the possible financial gains of using the platform. In fact, one of the key issues for platforms is that the producer has more information about what is being exchanged, sold or traded than the users. Using the example of cars, famous economic Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof wrote a very insightful paper titled ‘The Market for Lemons’. In it, he explains that if some sellers are selling cars in working order while others are selling broken cars (so-called ‘lemons’, presumably because they leave a bitter taste in the mouth of buyers) and that buyers have no way of knowing which is which, then the price of all the cars will converge towards the price of the worst possible car.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Variance has social and psychological meaning, bound up with our notions of reliability, stereotypes about travel and limited personal experience. Put another way, some people will never get a bus to a hospital appointment. This means there’s little sense in making a service more reliable if the perception of its reliability is already lagging behind reality. Economists call this the ‘market for lemons’: if the customer (traveller) knows some services are bad and others good, but they are unable to know which ones are which, they are inclined to act as though all services are bad. George Akerlof won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for applying this analysis to second-hand cars, but this downward spiral should concern mass transit operators providing services of variable quality too.16 Social research is the first step to resolving this: talking to people helps transport planners understand motivations, fears and assumptions.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

The $85 billion it held in mortgage-backed securities in 2007 was about four times more than the underlying value of its capital, meaning that a 25 percent decline in their value would likely be enough to bankrupt the company.77 Ordinarily, investors would have been extremely reluctant to purchase assets like these—or at least they would have hedged their bets very carefully. “If you’re in a market and someone’s trying to sell you something which you don’t understand,” George Akerlof told me, “you should think that they’re selling you a lemon.” Akerlof wrote a famous paper on this subject called “The Market for Lemons”78—it won him a Nobel Prize. In the paper, he demonstrated that in a market plagued by asymmetries of information, the quality of goods will decrease and the market will come to be dominated by crooked sellers and gullible or desperate buyers. Imagine that a stranger walked up to you on the street and asked if you were interested in buying his used car.

David Miles, Bank of England, “Monetary Policy in Extraordinary Times,” speech given to the Centre for Economic Policy Research and London Business School, February 23, 2011. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2011/speech475.pdf 77. Investopedia staff, “Case Study: The Collapse of Lehman Brothers,” Investopedia; April 2, 2009. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/lehman-brothers-collapse.asp#axzz1bZ61K9wz. 78. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (Aug. 1970). http://sws.bu.edu/ellisrp/EC387/Papers/1970Akerlof_Lemons_QJE.pdf. 79. “Lehman Brothers F1Q07 (Qtr End 2/28/07) Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, Mar. 14, 2007. http://seekingalpha.com/article/29585-lehman-brothers-f1q07-qtr-end-2-28-07-earnings-call-transcript?


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A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Sellers of nags (worn-out old horses) use all sorts of tricks to make their horses look lively. These can have bad consequences, though: ‘On one side of the market are the tricksters. The other side avoids the tricksters. In the extreme, markets totally collapse.’ Akerlof became famous for a 1970 article, ‘The Market for Lemons’, which looked at the modern-day version of the horse-buyer’s dilemma: how to buy a second-hand car. The car that you’re thinking of buying from your local dealer might be a good one. It could, however, be a dud (a ‘lemon’), one that looks fine on the garage forecourt but is sure to break down if it’s driven more than a few miles down the road.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

., Chandler, D., Hood, A., Joyce, R. 2015. Social Housing in England: A Survey. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Aikman, David, Andrew G. Haldane, and Benjamin D. Nelson. 2014. ‘Curbing the Credit Cycle’. The Economic Journal 125 (585). doi:10.1111/ecoj.12113. Akerlof, George A. 1970. ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3): 488–500. Allen, Kate and Anna Nicolaou. 2015. ‘Global Property Bubble Fears Mount as Prices and Yields Spike’. Financial Times, 16 April. https://next.ft.com/content/7ba6556e-e28d-11e4-ba33-00144feab7de.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

It may correct itself if better boards arise, or if a shrewd company such as Samsung cannily attaches its name to the best. Noticeably, brands such as Juul and Vype are starting to emerge in the similarly haphazard vaping market. In many ways, expensive advertising and brands arise as a solution to a problem identified by George Akerlof in his 1970 paper ‘The Market for Lemons’ in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The problem is known as ‘information asymmetry’, whereby the seller knows more about what he is selling than the buyer knows about what he is buying. This lesson was learned the hard way in Eastern Bloc countries under communism; brands were considered un-Marxist, so bread was simply labelled ‘bread’.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

Akerlof and Stiglitz shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Michael Spence for their work on information asymmetry, the idea that markets do not efficiently allocate resources when there is a large gap between 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 the market for used cars as an example of the “lemon effect”: where the quality of cars is low, the owners of good cars will not put their cars up for sale because buyers, who lack information, will assume those good cars are merely average.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

If education is sold as an investment good, if there is an unlimited supply of certificates and if these do not yield the promised return, in terms of access to good jobs and high income with which to pay off debts incurred because 72 THE PRECARIAT they were nudged to buy more of the commodity, more entering the precariat will be angry and bitter. The market for lemons comes to mind. As does the old Soviet joke, in which the workers said, ‘They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work’. The education variant would be as follows: ‘They pretend to educate us, we pretend to learn’. Infantilising the mind is part of the process, not for the elite but for the majority.


pages: 339 words: 95,988

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

THE BRAND-NEW USED-CAR CONUNDRUM: This thesis, and indeed much of what we think today about “asymmetric information,” stems from a paper that George A. Akerlof wrote during his first year as an assistant professor at Berkeley in 1966–67. It was rejected three times—two of the journals told Akerlof that they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality,” as he later recalled—before being published as George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1970. Some thirty years later, the paper won Akerlof the Nobel Prize in Economics; he is widely considered the nicest man to have ever won the award. THE ENRON TAPES: As of this writing, the tapes could be heard on http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/eveningnews/main6_20626.shtml.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Mike Masnick, “Supreme Court Chief Justice Admits He Doesn’t Read Online EULAs or Other ‘Fine Print,’” Techdirt, October 22, 2010, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101021/02145811519.shtml, accessed July 7, 2015. 8. Mike Masnick, “Proof That (Almost) No One Reads End User License Agreements,” Techdirt, February 23, 2005, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050223/1745244.shtml, accessed July 7, 2015. 9. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1879431, accessed July 7, 2015. 10. Services like Carfax have addressed this problem by making information about specific vehicles more readily available.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Aghion, Philippe, Caroli, Eve, and Garcia-Penalosa, Cecilia. 1999. “Inequality and Economic Growth: The Perspective of the New Growth Theories.” Journal of Economic Literature 37, 1615–1660. Aghion, Philippe, and Tirole, Jean. 1994. “The Management of Innovation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 109, 1185–1210. Akerlof, George. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, 488–500. Albanesi, Stefania. 2000. “Inflation and Inequality.” Unpublished, Northwestern University, Chicago. Alesina, Alberto. 1997. “The Political Economy of High and Low Growth.” In B. Pleskovic and J.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

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

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

The tax bill paid by American drivers from the US Department of Transportation, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/2000hfbt.pdf. The effect of London’s congestion charge on traffic levels is described in “Congestion Charging Six Months On,” Transport for London, October 2003. Chapter 5 The classic article on lemons and asymmetric information is George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 1970). Akerlof ’s book An Economic Theorist’s Book of Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) contains many of his most interesting papers up to that date—not only the lemons paper but, for instance, economic theories of the caste system.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Note that this would create a highly liquid market in home refinancings. 50. A team of researchers led by Nikhil Naik is already using image analysis to conduct automated property assessments for real estate, so this idea is not as farfetched as it may at first sound. 51. George A. Akerlof, The Market for “Lemons”: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, 84 Quarterly Journal of Economics 488 (1970); Michael Spence, Job Market Signaling, 87 Quarterly Journal of Economics 355 (1973). 52. Richard Thaler, Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice, 1 Journal of Economics, Behavior, and Organizations 39 (1980). 53.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Geertz, an anthropologist, spent decades observing bazaar life in Morocco and Indonesia. 4 sell for more than thirteen times their production price: See Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (New York: Penguin, 2008) This delicious exposé of the real cost and decline of luxury reveals—among many, many other things, that the average markup of a handbag is ten to twelve times its production cost. A Vuitton bag, however, is marked up as much as thirteen times. 5 in the same terms as he to them: Clifford Geertz, “Bazaar Economy.” 6 illustrates the problem with a thought experiment: George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488-500. CHAPTER ONE: DISCOUNT NATION 7 or generate even as much power as a horse: Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 95-96.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Extending this good car/bad car case to where there is a continuum of quality of cars, we might find that not only do the bad cars drive out the good cars, but the really bad cars drive out the moderately bad ones, and so on, until no market exists at all. This basic argument, presented in George Akerlof’s famous paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1970, pages 488–500), was the basis for his award of the Nobel Prize in 2001. 6. Carol J. Loomis’s Fortune article, “Warren Buffett’s Wild Ride at Salomon” (October 27, 1997), provides an insider’s view of Warren Buffett’s reaction to this scandal.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson. 2008. “The Role of Institutions in Growth and Development.” Working Paper No. 10. Washington, DC: Commission on Growth and Development. Achenbach, Joel. 2010. “The National Debt and Washington’s Deficit of Will.” Washington Post, 15 April. Akerlof, George. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84:3, pp. 488–500. Alesina, Alberto, and Edward Glaeser. 2006. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Adelino, Manuel, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino. 2011. “Credit Supply and House Prices: Evidence from Mortgage Market Segmentation.” Unpublished paper, Tuck School, Dartmouth College. Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84(3):488–500. ———. 1976. “The Economics of Caste and of the Rat Race and Other Woeful Tales.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90(4):599–617. Akerlof, George A., and Rachel E. Kranton. 2010. Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Craig Silverman (24 Jul 2015), “7 creepy baby monitor stories that will terrify all parents,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/creeps-hack-baby-monitors-and-say-terrifying-thing. 133Many brands are hackable: Carl Franzen (4 Aug 2017), “How to find a hack-proof baby monitor,” Lifehacker, https://offspring.lifehacker.com/how-to-find-a-hack-proof-baby-monitor-1797534985. 133“[Our] technology transmits a secure”: Amazon.com (accessed 24 Apr 2018), “VTech DM111 audio baby monitor with up to 1,000 ft of range, 5-level sound indicator, digitized transmission & belt clip,” https://www.amazon.com/VTech-DM111-Indicator-Digitized-Transmission/dp/B00JEV5UI8/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_75_bs_lp_t_1. 134I couldn’t tell the good from the bad: I found one security assessment of a few brands. Mark Stanislav and Tod Beardsley (29 Sep 2015), “Hacking IoT: A case study on baby monitor exposure and vulnerabilities,” Rapid7, https://www.rapid7.com/docs/Hacking-IoT-A-Case-Study-on-Baby-Monitor-Exposures-and-Vulnerabilities.pdf. 134“lemons market”: George A. Akerlof (1 Aug 1970), “The market for ‘lemons’: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3, https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/84/3/488/1896241. 134The result is that insecure products: Bruce Schneier (19 Apr 2007), “How security companies sucker us with lemons,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2007/04/security matters-0419. 134There is nothing like this today: One study estimated it would take average consumers 244 hours/year to read all of the privacy policies they agree to.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

This is an instance in which a classic problem in pre-digital markets should have been put to rest to a significant degree by digital designs. The supposed transparency of the way we have structured our present information economy turned out to be unusable. The problem in question is known as the “Market for Lemons,” after the title of the famous paper, which helped earn its author, George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize13 in Economics. The lemons in the paper were not from the lemonade stand we encountered earlier, but were instead crummy used cars for sale. The paper detailed how a prevalence of bad used cars distorted markets through the mechanism of information asymmetry.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

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

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

Second wife of Jim Wright. WRIGHT, JAMES “JIM,” JR. (D-TX). Speaker of the House, 1987–1989. WYLIE, CHALMERS P. (R-OH). Member of the House Banking Committee. REFERENCES Adams, Jim 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 Economic Activity 2:1–73. American Banker, 1987. Article dated February 10.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

,” BBC News, June 8, 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32786537; “Air Quality on Planes: Aerotoxic Syndrome,” Economist, February 7, 2013, https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2013/02/07/aerotoxic-syndrome; Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, “Issues: Aircraft Air Quality—Protecting Against Contaminants,” accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.afacwa.org/aircraft_air_quality. 77.George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500, https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431. 78.Healthline, “Experts Agree: Sugar Might Be as Addictive as Cocaine,” accessed April 12, 2018, https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/experts-is-sugar-addictive-drug#1. 79.Nell Boeschenstein, “How the Food Industry Manipulates Taste Buds with ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” NPR, February 26, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/26/172969363/how-the-food-industry-manipulates-taste-buds-with-salt-sugar-fat. 80.Boeschenstein, “How the Food Industry Manipulates Taste Buds.”


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Aiyar, S. (2016), ‘Dodgy Statistics and Global Tempests Can Sink Budget Calculations’, Economic Times, 2 March. Aiyar, Y., and M. Walton (2014), ‘Rights, Accountability and Citizenship: Examining India’s Emerging Welfare State’, Accountability Initiative, Working Paper, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Akerlof, G. (1970), ‘The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84(3), 488–​500. Alfaro, L., and A. Chari (2010), ‘India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988–​2005’, India Policy Forum 2009/​10, Vol. 6, 153–​224. Amin, A. (2009), ‘Labour Regulation and Employment in India’s Retail Stores’, Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 37(1), 47–​61. 324 Anand, R., D.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

"Capital Structure After Debt Restructurings: Why Do Firms Remain Overleveraged?," Dartmouth College mimeo Qune). Aghion, Philippe, Oliver Hart, and John Moore (1992). "The Economics of Bankruptcy Reform," Massachusetts Institute of Technology Economics Department Working Paper 92-11, May. Akerlof, George (1970). "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (August), pp. 488-500. Alberts, William W., and Nikhil P. Varaiya (1989). "Assessing the Profitability of Growth by Acquisition," International Journal of Industrial Organization!, pp. 133-149. Ando, Albert, and Franco Modigliani (1963).


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Steinmueller and Juan Mateos-Garcia (2009) ‘Rebooting Britain’, Nesta Policy Briefing. 6 Rohit Talwar and Tim Hancock (2010) ‘The Shape of Jobs to Come: Possible New Careers Emerging from Advances in Science and Technology (2010–2030)’, report, Fast Future. 7 Ian Brinkley (2008) ‘The Knowledge Economy: How Knowledge is Reshaping the Economic Life of Nations’, report, Work Foundation. 8 Robert Nozick (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books, p. 169. 9 Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel (2002) The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, Harvard University Press. 10 Will Hutton and Philippe Schneider (2008) ‘The Failure of Market Failure: Towards a 21st Century Keynesianism’, Nesta Provocation. 11 George Akerlof (1970) ‘The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3): 488–500. 12 Nava Asraf, Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein (2005) ‘Adam Smith,Behavioral Economist’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (3): 131–45. 13 John Coates and Joe Herbert (2008) ‘Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 6167–72. 14 Technically, this can be understood as rational behaviour. 15 Studies have sought to limit attention to one potential bias at a time; but several biases might plausibly explain behaviour.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

., ‘Measuring Poverty When Inflation Varies Across Households’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2014) Aikman, D. et al., ‘Taking Uncertainty Seriously: Simplicity Versus Complexity in Financial Regulation’, Bank of England Financial Stability Paper Number 28 (2014) Aitken, I., ‘Obituary: Viscount Whitelaw of Penrith’, Guardian (2 July 1999) Akerlof, G. A., ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics , Vol. 84, No. 3 (1970), 488–500 Aktipis, C. A., Cronk, L. and de Aguiar, R., ‘Risk-Pooling and Herd Survival: An Agent-Based Model of a Maasai Gift-Giving System’, Human Ecology , Vol. 39, No. 2 (2011), 131–40 Alchian, A.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Afonso, Antonio, Ludger Schuknecht, and Vito Tanzi, 2005, “Public Sector Efficiency: An International Comparison,” Public Choice 123, pp. 321–347. 2010, “Public Sector Efficiency: Evidence for New EU Member States and Emerging Markets,” Applied Economics 42 (17), pp. 2147–2164. Ahamed, Liaquat, 1999, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: The Penguin Press). Akerlof, George A., 1970, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3) (August), pp. 488–500. Akerlof, George A. and Robert Shiller, 2009, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy: And Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 2015, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

“Dependency Status and Demand for Social Insurance: Evidence from Experiments and Surveys.” Political Science Research and Methods 5(1): 31–53. Ahlquist, John S. and Margaret Levi. 2013. In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism. Princeton University Press. Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84(3): 488–500. Aldrich, John. 1993. “Rational Choice and Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 37(1): 246–78. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago University Press.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The Decline and Fall of the American Republic. Second Tanner Lecture on Human Values. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Adler, Matthew D. “Justification, Legitimacy, and Administrative Governance.” Symposium: The Reformation of American Administrative Law 3 (2005). Akerlof, George A. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. Alesina, Alberto, and Paola Giuliano. “Culture and Institutions.” Journal of Economic Literature 53, no. 4 (2014): 898–944. Alesina, Alberto, and Howard Rosenthal. “A Theory of Divided Government.”


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

“Do Ideas Matter for Economics Policy? Evidence from Newspaper Coverage of Balance of Payments Crises in India.” https://uic.academia.edu/Departments/Economics/Documents. Adhia, Nimish. 2013. “The Role of Ideological Change in India’s Economic Liberalization.” Journal of Socioeconomics 44:103–111. Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84:488–500. 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 Press. Alfani, Guido. 2013.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

“Jobs and the Clever Robot,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, pp. A1, A10. Agar, Jon. (2013). Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. London: Icon. Agus, David B. (2012). “The 2000-Year-Old Wonder Drug,” The New York Times, December 12, p. A31. Akerlof, George A. (1970). “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August): 488–500. Alexander, June Granatir. (2009). Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870–1920: How the Second Great Wave of Immigrants Made Their Way in America. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. Alexopoulos, Michell, and Cohen, Jon. (2009).


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

id=4695350. [425] “Multiple OpenSSL signature verification API misuse”, oCERT Advisory 2008-016, 7 January 2009, http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2008016.html. [426] “Incorrect checks for malformed signatures”, OpenSSL Advisory 20090107, 7 January 2009, http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20090107.txt. [427] “SSL certificate fails to adhere to basic constraints and PCI compliance”, ‘pbz’, 29 October 2011, http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8492/ssl-certificate-fails-to-adhere-to-basicconstraints-and-pci-compliance. [428] “SSL Certificate Fails to Adhere to Basic Constraints / Key Usage Extensions”, discussion thread at http://support.godaddy.com/groups/community/forum/topic/ssl-certificate-fails-to-adhere-tobasic-constraints-key-usage-extensions, October/November 2011. [429] “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”, George Akerlof, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol.84, No.3 (August 1970), p.488. [430] “Markets in Imperfect Information — Lemons, Limes and Silver Bullets”, Ian Grigg, 14 May 2006, http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000721.html. [431] “The Market for Silver Bullets”, Ian Grigg, 2 March 2008, http://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html.