George Akerlof
The mind behind identity economics and the theory of asymmetric information
Intro
George Akerlof is an American economist who, throughout his career, has continuously emphasized the importance of integrating psychology and economics. The importance of incorporating factors such as emotion and cognitive bias into economic models has been increasingly acknowledged over the past decades. With his theories of asymmetric information, the role of identity in economics, and animal spirits, the psychological factors that influence our economic decision-making, it is clear that Akerlof has played a key role in bringing these two fields together.
I think it’s natural to combine psychology and macroeconomics. Actually, if you don’t take psychology into account, I think it’s fairly hard to give a model of the economy that explains a great deal of the economic fluctuations that are going on.
– George A. Akerlof in an interview with Conor Clarke for The Atlantic in 2009
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
