You weren’t stupid, just “asymmetrical.” And the Nobel people will back you up on that. This year’s economics prize went to UC Berkeley’s George Akerlof, former Stanford Business School dean Michael Spence and Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz for research in asymmetric information: how markets behave inefficiently when buyers have less info than sellers. “The essence of these theories is that people aren’t fooled forever and that their expectations are constrained by data,” says Spence. “During the Internet boom there was a period of time where we were out of the range of our experience and unconstrained by data, and we got what turned out to be unrealistic valuations. Those came down as the data began to trickle in, and we realized that the old rules apply.” The trio will split $945,000. Symmetrically.
