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…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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