Joseph Stiglitz

Stiglitz shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with George Akerlof and Michael Spence. Their work explained how markets behave when buyers, sellers, employers, or workers possess different information.

Information asymmetry exists when one participant in a transaction knows something important that another does not. Stiglitz showed how screening, incentives, and imperfect information can produce outcomes unlike those predicted by simple competitive-market models.

Stiglitz served as the World Bank's chief economist in the late 1990s. He later criticized aspects of globalization policy and the conditions imposed on developing countries by international financial institutions.

Globalization and Its Discontents, published in 2002, is one of his best-known books. It argues that institutions such as the International Monetary Fund often managed globalization in ways that harmed vulnerable economies.