There have been three major methodological developments in economics since 1970. First, following the Lucas Critique we are reluctant to accept policy advice which is not the result of directed behavior on the part of individuals and firms. Second, developments in game theory have made it possible to reformulate questions like “why do firms exist?”, “what will result from regulating a particular industry in a particular way?”, “what can I infer about the state of the world from an offer to trade?”, among many others. Third, imperfect and asymmetric information was shown to be of first-order importance for analyzing economic problems.

Why is information so important? Prices, Hayek taught us, solve the problem of asymmetric information about scarcity. Knowing the price vector is a sufficient statistic for knowing everything about production processes in every firm, as far as generating efficient behavior is concerned. The simple existence of asymmetric information, then, is not obviously a problem for economic efficiency. And if asymmetric information about big things like scarcity across society does not obviously matter, then how could imperfect information about minor things matter? A shopper, for instance, may not know exactly the price of every car at every dealership. But “Natura non facit saltum”, Marshall once claimed: nature does not make leaps. Tiny deviations from the assumptions of general equilibrium do not have large consequences.

But Marshall was wrong: nature does make leaps when it comes to information. The search model of Peter Diamond, most famously, showed that arbitrarily small search costs lead to firms charging the monopoly price in equilibrium, hence a welfare loss completely out of proportion to the search costs. That is, information costs and asymmetries, even very small ones, can theoretically be very problematic for the Arrow-Debreu welfare properties.

Even more interesting, we learned that prices are more powerful than we’d believed. They convey information about scarcity, yes, but also information about other people’s own information or effort. Consider, for instance, efficiency wages. A high wage is not merely a signal of scarcity for a particular type of labor, but is simultaneously an effort inducement mechanism. Given this dual role, it is perhaps not surprising that general equilibrium is no longer Pareto optimal, even if the planner is as constrained informationally as each agent.

How is this? Decentralized economies may, given information cost constraints, exert too much effort searching, or generate inefficient separating equilibrium that unravel trades. The beautiful equity/efficiency separation of the Second Welfare Theorem does not hold in a world of imperfect information. A simple example on this point is that it is often useful to allow some agents suffering moral hazard worries to “buy the firm”, mitigating the incentive problem, but limited liability means this may not happen unless those particular agents begin with a large endowment. That is, a different endowment, where the agents suffering extreme moral hazard problems begin with more money and are able to “buy the firm”, leads to more efficient production (potentially in a Pareto sense) than an endowment where those workers must be provided with information rents in an economy-distorting manner.

It is a strange fact that many social scientists feel economics to some extent stopped progressing by the 1970s. All the important basic results were, in some sense, known. How untrue this is! Imagine labor without search models, trade without monopolistic competitive equilibria, IO or monetary policy without mechanism design, finance without formal models of price discovery and equilibrium noise trading: all would be impossible given the tools we had in 1970. The explanations that preceded modern game theoretic and information-laden explanations are quite extraordinary: Marshall observed that managers have interests different from owners, yet nonetheless are “well-behaved” in running firms in a way acceptable to the owner. His explanation was to credit British upbringing and morals! As Stiglitz notes, this is not an explanation we would accept today. Rather, firms have used a number of intriguing mechanisms to structure incentives in a way that limits agency problems, and we now possess the tools to analyze these mechanisms rigorously.

Final 2000 QJE (RePEc IDEAS)