Harsanyi, John Charles (1920-2000), a Hungarian-born American economist, made important contributions to the development of game theory. Game theory is a method of analyzing situations in which people’s interests conflict. For his work, Harsanyi shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics with fellow American John Nash and a German, Reinhard Selten. Game theory tries to work out how people make economic choices in gamelike situations. Harsanyi analyzed situations in which people were making decisions in competition with others, with little information about each other’s objectives.
Harsanyi was born in Budapest, Hungary. A pharmacist’s son, he studied pharmacy at the University of Budapest. In 1944, during World War II, Harsanyi, who was Jewish, was sent to a forced labor camp by the German Nazi invaders of Hungary. Later that year, he escaped from a train intended to take him to a death camp.
Harsanyi returned to the University of Budapest in 1946 and gained a Ph.D. in philosophy the following year. He then became a junior lecturer in sociology, but his political views were unacceptable to the Communist government that then ruled Hungary. In 1950, he escaped from Hungary, moved to Australia, and took economics courses at the University of Sydney. Later, he lectured in economics at several universities in Australia and the United States. In 1959, Harsanyi received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. From 1964, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley.
