George Akerlof, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist and a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Akerlof was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information." He is the husband of former United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an award in the field of economic sciences administered by the Nobel Foundation, established in 1968 by Sveriges Riksbank to celebrate its 300th anniversary and in memory of Alfred Nobel.