Professor Rulon D. Pope has made important contributions to the agricultural economics profession in research, teaching and administration. He has been an influential voice arguing that the methods of general economics must be carefully adapted to agricultural problems in order to reap their most powerful results.

Professor Pope was reared in rural Idaho on fruit, crop, and dairy farms. His inquisitive thinking about practical problems in farm production led him from a baccalaureate degree in economics from Brigham Young University to a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from University of California, Berkeley. For two decades at three different universities, he has been a strong spokesman for academic excellence and has initiated a depth of thinking about agricultural economic problems benefiting colleagues and students. He has served with distinction as President of the Western Agricultural Economics Association and as chair of his department. One of his most attractive qualities that endears him to colleagues and students is a sincere modesty regarding his personal merits and professional contributions. His work is marked by an ability to identify interesting problems, to use the best theoretical and analytical tools available, and by a unified view of economic problems. Though he is best known for his work in theory and methods, he has consistently contributed to an understanding of human behavior through his empirical work as well.

Professor Pope has produced ground-breaking papers on agricultural producer behavior and consumer food purchases. One of the early and most influential contributors to the analysis of production under uncertainty, he has also produced innovative work in other aspects of uncertainty, aggregation constraints, separability, and the development of restrictions (nullity) derived from economic theory. His early work provided a cogent rationale for Heteroskedasticity in econometric models. This work both specified and estimated a new representation of technology under risk which has been shown to be an important generalization needed for agricultural production problems.

Building on his dissertation, his work on duality stimulated a growing body of literature on generalizations of the standard approaches for agricultural problems, on measuring allocatable but fixed inputs, and on problems of complete system estimation for agricultural production under risk. His related work shows that econometric restrictions from optimal behavior must be added for many agricultural problems. More recently, he has shown that standard dual methods produce biased estimates for many agricultural problems unless the proper adaptations are made.

Pope's research on measurement of firm welfare under risk provides the conceptual basis for empirical analysis of policies involving producer risk. Related work creates new methods to test for stochastic efficiency by exploiting stochastic dominance theory. His work on the fundamental problems of traditional index numbers suggests important modifications in methods of analysis using aggregate data.

Known primarily to colleagues for his seminal research, Professor Pope has made important contributions as an administrator and dedicated teacher. He teaches with rigor and good natured humor insisting that his students push their understanding of economics deeper. He has served his department and the profession in administrative assignments without significant diminution of his research. His two decades in the profession have been marked by consistent adaptation and development of rigorous economic theory and measurement suitable for agricultural problems.