Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal and Interpretive Essay

George Akerlof

No 2001-10, Nobel Prize in Economics documents from Nobel Prize Committee

Abstract: I wrote "The Market for 'Lemons,'" (a 13-page paper for which I was awarded the Prize in Economics) during my first year as assistant professor at Berkeley, in 1966-67.* "Lemons" deals with a problem as old as markets themselves. It concerns how horse traders respond to the natural question: "if he wants to sell that horse, do I really want to buy it?" Such questioning is fundamental to the market for horses and used cars, but it is also at least minimally present in every market transaction.

Keywords: asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-11-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html Full text (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:nobelp:2001_010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Nobel Prize in Economics documents from Nobel Prize Committee
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().