Tag: George Ackerloff

  • Touchstone Terms: Adverse Selection

    Touchstone Terms: Adverse Selection

    If there were a single concept from economics I’d like to see more widely understood, it would be adverse selection: the tendency for markets to sort participants into worse and worse pools when one side of a transaction knows more than the other. The idea originates in a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, “The Market…