Harsanyi, John Charles

▪ 2001

      Hungarian-born American economist and philosopher (b. May 29, 1920, Budapest, Hung.—d. Aug. 9, 2000, Berkeley, Calif.), shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in game theory. As a secondary school student, he won a national prize in mathematics, but he studied pharmacology so that he could help in his father's business. He narrowly escaped being sent to a forced-labour camp by the Nazis in 1944. After World War II he returned to the Technical University of Budapest, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1947. Harsanyi taught sociology at the university for a year but was dismissed because of his anti-Marxist views. In 1950 he escaped to Austria and then went to Australia, where in 1953 he received an M.A. in economics from the University of Sydney. In 1954 he became a lecturer at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and in 1956 he entered Stanford University, where he gained a Ph.D. in 1959. After teaching at the Australian National University in Canberra and at Wayne State University in Detroit, in 1964 he became a professor in the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1966 he became professor of economics. He built on the work of John F. Nash, one of his fellow recipients of the Nobel Prize, by extending game theory so that it could be applied to situations in which people had little knowledge of their competitors' intentions. With Reinhard Selten, the third recipient of the prize, he published A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (1988). Other books included Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior and Scientific Explanation (1976), and Papers in Game Theory (1982). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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