October 12, 2001, Wall Street Journal What the Nobel Economists Missed By David R. Henderson. Mr. Henderson is a research Fellow with the Hoover Institution and author of "The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey" (Financial Times Prentice-Hall, 2001). On Wednesday, the Nobel mittee announced this year's winners for economics: Berkeley's e Akerlof, Stanford's Michael Spence, and Columbia's Joseph Stiglitz. Americans all, they won the award for their path-breaking contributions to the economics of "asymmetric" information. The awards may well be justified, especially for Messrs. Stiglitz and Akerlof. But unfortunately the mittee, and economists in general, are missing the big picture on information economics. Let me explain, first by highlighting the three economists' contributions. Mr. Akerlof, in a famous 1970 article, gave a new explanation for a well-known phenomenon: the fact that cars barely a few months old sell for well below their price when new. He pointed out that although a certain proportion of new cars are lemons, once they are sold people are more likely to keep the good ones and less likely to keep the lemons. Potential buyers of used cars, knowing this fact, will pay substantially less for a used car because of the higher probability that it's a lemon. Why is this a problem? Because the potential sellers of good used cars can't get a price that reflects
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