CONCEPT
The Lemons Problem for Expertise
The AI-era extension of Akerlof's 1970 framework to the market for professional expertise: when AI-assisted output is structurally indistinguishable from deep expert work, the market cannot distinguish quality from plausible surface, the premium on depth collapses, and deep practitioners are driven from the market by the inability of buyers to perceive what they would be buying.
Akerlof's lemons analysis was developed for used cars: when buyers cannot distinguish quality, the market price reflects average quality, driving sellers of quality products out until only lemons remain. The market does not find equilibrium; it finds destruction.
Stiglitz's information-economics framework extended the analysis across markets, demonstrating that the lemons dynamic operates wherever severe
information asymmetry makes quality unobservable at the point of purchase. The AI era has created a lemons dynamic for professional expertise more severe than anything Akerlof contemplated. A lawyer using AI can produce a brief in four hours that is structurally indistinguishable from one produced in forty hours by a lawyer doing independent work. The client cannot tell the difference at the point of purchase. The cheaper brief wins. The deep practitioner is driven from the market not because her work is