Michael Roland Powers is the Zurich Insurance Group Professor of Risk Mathematics at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management. Since 2014, he has held a dual appointment as professor at Tsinghua's Schwarzman College. An internationally recognized insurance scholar, he was a 2011 recipient of China’s Qian Ren Ji Hua award. In 2013, he won the Kulp-Wright Book Award for Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance.
Research
Powers has published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of risk-related topics, with particular focus on issues of government regulation and public policy. His major research contributions include: the introduction of intertemporal discounting into collective risk theory ; the derivation of the “Powers-Shubik square-root rule” for the approximate number of reinsurance companies operating in a national insurance market; and a utility-theoretic solution of the Two Envelopes Paradox. A frequent collaborator of the late Martin Shubik, he is responsible for promoting the application of game-theoretic modeling in insurance and actuarial science. In Acts of God and Man, he proposes a science of risk based upon: a fundamentalist Bayesian approach to modeling uncertainty; a formal distinction between the "aloof" risks of insurance and the "non-aloof" risks of other financial markets; and a personalized scientific method emphasizing randomized controlled studies, mathematical and game-theoretic modeling, and statistical simulation.
Career
Powers was appointed Deputy Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1987, and subsequently was responsible for designing Pennsylvania’s current “choice” no-fault automobile insurance system. He joined the faculty of Temple University’s Fox School of Business in 1990, and moved to Tsinghua University in 2011. In 2013, he succeeded Professor David Daokui Li as chair of Tsinghua’s finance department, serving in that position until 2015.
During the 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Powers’ comments on the relative life expectancies of candidates John McCain and Barack Obama received media attention when cited by actor Matt Damon and others as a cause for concern. He has published occasional commentary at the Huffington Post, and is a regular panelist on China Radio International's Biz Today and World Today programs.
