Michael Spence

American economist — Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) with George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz — for his work on markets with asymmetric information — former Dean of Stanford Business School — author of The Next Convergence.

Creates the signaling theory of markets with information asymmetry — Spence's model (that education may function primarily as a signal of innate ability to employers rather than as a producer of human capital) is one of the most important and debated models in information economics.