Information Economics

When George Stigler published “The Economics of Information” in this journal a little over 50 years ago (1961), he was justified in his complaints about the absence of research on the topic. Yet, this complaint was soon to become obsolete. Figure 1 reports the incidence of the phrases “information e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of political economy 2017-12, Vol.125 (6), p.1885-1890
Main Author: Kamenica, Emir
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agency theory
and of Chicago Economics
Bargaining
Economic models
Information
Macroeconomics
Political economy
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Summary:When George Stigler published “The Economics of Information” in this journal a little over 50 years ago (1961), he was justified in his complaints about the absence of research on the topic. Yet, this complaint was soon to become obsolete. Figure 1 reports the incidence of the phrases “information economics” and “economics of information” normalized by the use of the word “economics” in books published from 1900 to 2008. The figure clearly shows that Stigler’s article was a harbinger of a new field of inquiry. The field grew quickly for the next 25 years, reached a plateau that lasted from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s, and then experienced another growth spurt. During the last decade, 13 percent of the articles published in the JPE had the word “information” in their abstract.
ISSN:0022-3808
1537-534X
DOI:10.1086/694628