George Stigler
Chicago economist (1911–1991) who helped pioneer the economics of information, industrial organization empirics, and the theory of regulatory capture.
Stigler treated regulation as endogenous: industries may seek rules that entrench incumbents, not tame them. His work on information, search, and dispersion complements later information-economics Nobel laureates.
He personifies a skeptical, empirically grounded Chicago view that reshaped antitrust and regulatory scholarship midcentury.
Regulation as political economy
Capture theory cautions that rulemakers may hear incumbents loudest—reason deregulation and antitrust narratives on this site keep returning to evidence about entry, prices, and wages, not slogans alone.