George Akerlof is a prominent American economist. He won a Novel prize for his article, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", published in 1970. Notably, over the span of 4 ECON 490 lectures, we have already mentioned this work. Interestingly, he pointed out the impact asymmetric information has on economic indicators, i.e. interest rates. Akerlof argued that government intervention is of little help to the problems caused by asymmetry.
Akerlof's Alma Mater is Yale. As he points out in an autobiographical article, his primary interests in the undergraduate years were economics and history. He received his Ph.D. at MIT. In his work, the economics has touched on topics both in marco- and microeconomics.
Most recently, George Akerlof introduced the field of identity economics. He is currently a professor at Georgetown University.
As you said, we've already discussed Akerlof's work in our class. He has a recent book with another Nobel Prize Winner, Robert Shiller, called Phishing for Phools. My sense of current market activity is that this type of scamming is on the increase, and not just the phishing we think happens on our computers, but also in a variety of other potential transactions.
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