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… is from page 119 of George Stigler [2]‘s 1968 volume, The Organization of Industry [3]; specifically, it’s from Stigler’s important June 1967 Journal of Political Economy article, “Imperfections in the Capital Market [4]“:
There is no “imperfection” in a market possessing incomplete knowledge if it would not be remunerative to acquire (produce) complete knowledge: information costs are the costs of transportation from ignorance to omniscience, and seldom can a trader afford to take the entire trip.