Nobel Prize in Economics to three Americans for work on market asymmetries. The article explains the implications of what sounds like an elegantly simple formulation of the information advantage enjoyed by sellers over buyers in transactions across the economic spectrum. One application of the work by one of the winners, Joseph Stiglitz (until recently chief economist at the World Bank), attacks ‘aspects of the free-market “Washington consensus” that has shaped the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’, arriving at a theoretical understanding of why markets do not work for ‘poor people and poor countries.’ Nobel Committee’s nod in the direction of the anti-globalization movement? Financial Times [via MetaFilter]