Obituary: Michael H. Rothkopf (1939-2008)
March 2, 2008
Michael Rothkopf died suddenly the morning of February 18, 2008, of a heart attack. Rothkopf, 68, was in his first year as a Smeal Chaired Professor of Supply Chain Management and Information Systems at the Pennsylvania State University, having been Professor of Management Science and Information Systems, and Senior Fellow of RUCTOR, the Rutgers Center for Operations Research, at Rutgers University since 1989. His first quarter-century after his 1964 MIT PhD in Operations Research was spent as a researcher in industry, at Shell, Xerox PARC, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.A regular consultant to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the last decade, during his academic career Rothkopf also was consultant to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, RAND, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and several regulatory authorities, regulated firms, and consulting groups. He was the 2004-5 President of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and for a decade the editor of Interfaces, their journal focusing on conversations between academic researchers and practitioners. In addition, he contributed to the Journal of Regulatory Economics both as an author and member of the Editorial Board.Mike Rothkopf has been a prominent researcher throughout the decades of regulatory upheaval, when traditional regulation has been narrowed in favor of markets. This development has made auction theory a central tool to regulatory economics. Rothkopf has seminal publications in auction theory dating back to 1965. An applied mathematical modeler by instinct, coming from an operations research background, his role the last two decades has been to push economists studying de-regulation in the direction of addressing practical problems.A 1975 paper (Operations Research, with Shmuel Oren) pointed out that firms bidding in de-regulated markets will be bidding repeatedly (hourly, in the case of some electricity ISO markets), and analyzed how that might affect incentives. Mike has brought this issue back to our attention every decade or so, most recently in two articles in the Energy Journal published under the pseudonym Price C. Watts.Rothkopf et al., Journal of Political Economy, 1990, pointed out that deregulatory mechanisms that might seem to provide proper incentives when viewed in isolation can look quite different in broader contexts. In particular, selling governmental assets via a Vickrey auction may put a winner, who must bargain ex post with suppliers, at a disadvantage. Bidders anticipating this will lower bids in public auctions to protect themselves, at taxpayer expense. New Zealand’s spectacular failure in its airwaves auctions a couple years later could have been avoided by paying attention to this article.Mike and I raised a number of these broader context issues in a 1994 Management Science “Critical Essay” that laid out a number of open questions of practical importance in using auction theory. To this day, that essay shows up on many graduate reading lists in top economics departments. Our 1995 Operations Research paper pointed to the importance of allowing bidders in high-stakes auctions an opportunity to withdraw tentatively winning bids in light of new information. A practical proposal offered there has been used in high-stakes telecom auctions by some 50 nations.Rothkopf, Pekec and I (Management Science, 1998) pointed to the need to keep multi-object auctions computationally manageable. That paper has spawned a couple thousand references and a half-dozen conferences, a major locus of the interaction between economists and computer scientists.Rothkopf has been cited by many students as a stimulating, engaged teacher with an open-door policy. An avid birdwatcher, Michael recently logged his 1,000th bird species sighted. He and his wife, Laura, have been global travelers. He will be missed both professionally and personally.Ronald M. HarstadUniversity of Missouri
