US economist. His analysis of wage rate differences in labour markets is the starting-point of all later work on ‘search models’ of unemployment, according to which unemployment is interpreted as a voluntary spell of searching for the best job at the best rate of pay. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1982 for his work on the theory of economic regulation. In a series of papers in the 1970s, Stigler suggested the simple hypothesis that government agencies, supposedly established to regulate the price and investment policies of public utilities in the interest of consumers, are best understood as acting instead in the interests of producers, not out of malice but simply as a result of the logic of public regulation. Stigler and others have since gone on to explore the implications of this hypothesis for one US regulatory agency after another. His doctoral dissertation was completed in 1938 and published in 1941 under the title Production and Distribution Theories . It was…