Rosenthal, Robert W. (1944–2002)

Abstract

Robert W. Rosenthal (1944–2002) was an economic theorist whose thoughtful papers inspired a wide range of new ideas. As Radner and Ray (2003) point out, Rosenthal (1978) gives one of the first formal statements of the revelation principle, a result noted in Myerson’s first paper (1979) on the subject. Rosenthal (1979) initiated the study of repeated games with varying opponents, a modelling device used by Milgrom et al. (1990), Kandori (1992), and others to study social norms and other issues. He also wrote influential papers on pricing (Rosenthal 1980, 1982), multi-unit auctions (Krishna and Rosenthal 1996), purification of mixed strategy equilibria (Radner and Rosenthal 1982; Aumann et al. 1983), sovereign debt (Fernandez and Rosenthal 1990), analysis of experimental data (Brown and Rosenthal 1990), and many other topics.