Everything about John Harsanyi totally explained
John Charles Harsanyi
(born
May 29,
1920 in
Budapest,
Hungary; died
August 9,
2000 in
Berkeley, California,
United States) was a
Hungarian-
Australian-
American economist and
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics winner.
He is best known for his contributions to the study of
game theory and its application to economics, specifically for his developing the highly innovative analysis of games of incomplete information, so-called
Bayesian games. He also made important contributions to the use of game theory and economic reasoning in political and moral philosophy (specifically
utilitarian ethics)as well as contributing to the study of
equilibrium selection. For his work, he was a co-recipient along with
John Nash and
Reinhard Selten of the
1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Biography
John C. Harsanyi was born in
Budapest,
Hungary on
May 29,
1920. He attended high school at the
Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, during high school, became the one of the best problem solver of the
KöMaL, the Mathematical and Physical Monthly for Secondary Schools. Founded in 1893, this periodical is generally credited with a large share of Hungarian students' success in mathematics., he also won the first prize in the Eötvös mathematics competition
Eötvös
for high school students. Although he wanted to study mathematics and philosophy, his father, who was the owner of a pharmacy, sent him to
France in
1939 to enroll in chemical engineering at the
University of Lyons. However, because of the start of
World War II, Harsanyi returned to Hungary to study pharmacology at the
University of Budapest (today:
Eötvös Loránd University), earning a diploma in
1944. As a pharmacology student, Harsanyi escaped conscription into the
Hungarian Army which, as a person of
Jewish descent, would have meant forced labor. However, in 1944 (after the fall of the
Horthy regime and the seizure of power by the
Arrow Cross Party) his military deferment was cancelled and he was compelled to join a forced labor unit on the
Eastern Front. After seven months of forced labor, when the Nazi authorities decided to deport his unit to a
concentration camp in
Austria, John Harsanyi managed to escape and found sanctuary for the rest of the war in a
Jesuit monastery.
After the end of the war, Harsanyi returned to the University of Budapest for graduate studies in philosophy, earning his Ph.D. in
1947. Being a devout
Catholic at the time, he simultaneously studied theology, also joining lay ranks of the
Dominican Order. He later lost his faith after that, becoming an
atheist for the rest of his life.
Harsanyi spent the academic year 1947-1948 on the faculty of the Institute of Sociology of the University of Budapest, where he met Anne Klauber, his future wife. He was forced to resign the faculty because of openly expressing his anti-
Marxist opinions, while Anne faced increasing peer pressure to leave him for the same reason. After managing his family's pharmacy for two years, following increased political persecution by the
Hungarian communist authorities, Harsanyi decided to escape from Hungary. In 1950 he fled with Anne and her parents by illegally crossing the border with Austria, then going to
Australia. Here, he and Anne were married in 1951.
In
Sydney, while working as a factory laborer, Harsanyi studied
economics in the evening courses at the
University of Sydney, earning a M.A. in 1953. While studying in Sydney, he started publishing research papers in economic journals, including the
Journal of Political Economy and the
Review of Economic Studies. The degree allowed him to take a teaching position in 1956 at the
University of Queensland in
Brisbane.
In 1958, he received a Rockefeller
scholarship that enabled him and Anne to spend the next two years in the
United States, at
Stanford University and, for a semester, at the
Cowles Foundation. At Stanford Harsanyi wrote a dissertation in
game theory under the supervision of
Kenneth Arrow, earning a second PhD in economics in
1959, while Anne earned an MA in psychology.
After working for a short time as a researcher at the
Australian National University in
Canberra, Harsanyi became frustrated with the lack of interest in game theory in Australia. With the help of Kenneth Arrow and
James Tobin, he was able to move to the
United States, taking a position as professor of economics at the
Wayne State University in
Detroit between 1961-1963. In 1964, he moved to
Berkeley,
California, he remained at the
University of California, Berkeley until retiring in 1990. Shortly after arriving to Berkeley, he and Anne had a child, Tom. While teaching at Berkeley, John Harsanyi did extensive research in
game theory. From 1966 to 1968, Harsanyi was part of a team of game theorists tasked with advising the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in collaboration with Mathematica, a consulting group from
Princeton University lead by
Harold Kuhn and
Oskar Morgenstern.
John Harsanyi died in
2000 from
heart attack in Berkeley, California, after suffering for a time from
Alzheimer's disease.
Major Works by Harsanyi
- "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-Taking", Journal of Political Economy (1953)
- "Bargaining in Ignorance of the Opponent's Utility Function", Journal of Conflict Resolution (1962)
- "Games with Incomplete Information Played by "Bayesian" Players, I-III. Part I. The Basic Model", Management Science, Vol. 14, No. 3, Theory Series (1967)
- Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and Scientific Explanation, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing Company (1976)
- Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press (1977)
- Papers in Game Theory, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing Company (1982)
- A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (with Reinhard Selten), Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press. (1988)
Further Information
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