Harsanyi, John C(harles) (1920-2000)

Hungarian-born US economist. Harsanyi and Indian economist Amartya Sen are probably the leading figures in a small movement among economists to abandon the old taboo against making interpersonal comparisons of utility that is associated with the concept of Pareto-optimality, and to openly invade the subject of ethics concerned with making moral judgements - in short, to contract a new ‘utilitarian’ welfare economics that is capable of dealing rigorously with both private and public decisions. Harsanyi shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 with US mathematician John Nash and German economist Reinhard Selten.

Harsanyi also extended non-cooperative game theory so as to allow it to address strategic interaction between players whose information about each other's options, or each other's preferences, or each other's information, is ‘asymmetric’. Each knows something that all the others do not. He called such situations ‘games of incomplete information’ and his breakthrough was to show that such games of incomplete information have Nash equilibrium outcomes.

Harsanyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, and gained his PhD in 1947 from the University of Budapest. In 1950, he emigrated to Australia where he worked in a factory for several years while studying for an MA at the University of Sydney. In 1954 he became a lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. In 1956 he moved to the USA as a Rockefeller Fellow at Yale University. He gained a further PhD from Stanford University in 1959 and taught there for a year. He then returned to Australia as a senior fellow at the Australian National University (1959-61) but crossed the Pacific once again to become a professor of economics at Wayne State University (1961-63), then a professor of business administration and a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, posts which he held concurrently until retirement in 1990. Several years as a visiting professor at the University of Bielefeld, West Germany, in the 1970s gave him the opportunity to work with Selten, which resulted in a number of joint papers.

His publications include Essays in Ethics, Social Behavior and Scientific Explanation (1976), Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (1977), Papers in Game Theory (1982), and A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (1988; with Selten).