Robert E. Forsythe is an American economist. He is a former dean of the School of Business at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Prior to that, he was the dean of the school of business at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, Florida. He is a former professor and senior associate dean at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. He is also the founder of the Iowa Electronic Markets, an educational and research project that is an online futures market in which contract payoffs are based on real-world events.[1]