I
was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 29, 1920. The high school my parents chose
for me was the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, one of the best schools in Hungary,
with such distinguished alumni as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. I was
very happy in this school and received a superb education. In 1937, the year
I graduated from it, I won the First Prize in Mathematics at the Hungary-wide
annual competition for high school students.
My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave
us a comfortable living.
As I was their only child, they wanted me to become a pharmacist. But my own
preference would have been to study philosophy and mathematics. Yet, in 1937
when I actually had to decide my field of study, I chose pharmacy in accordance
with my parents' wishes. I did so because Hitler was in power in Germany, and
his influence was steadily increasing also in Hungary. I knew that as a pharmacy
student I would obtain military deferment. As I was of Jewish origin, this meant
that I would not have to serve in a forced labor unit of the Hungarian army.
As a result, I did have military deferment until the German army occupied Hungary
in March 1944. Then I did have to serve in a labor unit from May to November
1944.
In that November the Nazi authorities finally decided to deport my labor unit
from Budapest to an Austrian concentration camp, where most of my comrades eventually
perished. But I was lucky enough to make my escape from the railway station
in Budapest, just before our train left for Austria. Then a Jesuit father I
had known gave me refuge in the cellar of their monastery.
In 1946 I re-enrolled at the University of Budapest in order to obtain a Ph.D.
in philosophy with minors in sociology and in psychology. As I got credit for
my prior studies in pharmacy, I did get my Ph.D. in June 1947, after only one
more year of course work and after writing a dissertation in philosophy.
From September 1947 to June 1948 I served as a junior faculty member at the
University Institute of Sociology. There I met Anne Klauber, a psychology student
who attended a course I was teaching and who later became my wife. But in June
1948, I had to resign from the Institute because
the political situation no
longer permitted them to employ an outspoken anti-Marxist as I had been.
Yet Anne did go on with her studies. But she was continually harassed by her
Communist classmates to break up with me because of my political views, but
she did not. This made her realize, before I did, that Hungary was becoming
a completely Stalinist country, and that the only sensible course of action
for us was to leave Hungary.
Actually we did so only in April 1950. We had to cross the Hungarian border
illegally over a marshy terrain, which was less well guarded than other border
areas. But even so, we were very lucky not to be stopped or shot at by the Hungarian
border guards.
After waiting in Austria for our Australian landing permits for several months,
we actually reached Sydney, Australia, on December 30, 1950. On January 2, 1951,
Anne and I got married. Her unfailing emotional support and her practical good
sense have always been a great help to me.
As my English was not very good and as my Hungarian university degrees were
not recognized in Australia, during most of our first three years there I had
to do factory work. But in the evening I took economics courses at the University
of Sydney. (I changed over from sociology to economics because I found the conceptual
and mathematical elegance of economic theory very attractive.) I was given some
credit for my Hungarian university courses so that I had to do only two years
of further course work and had to write an M.A. thesis in economics in order
to get an M.A. I did receive the degree late in 1953.
Early in 1954 I was appointed Lecturer
in Economics at the University of Queensland
in Brisbane. Then, in 1956, I was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, enabling
me and Anne to spend two years at Stanford University, where I got a Ph.D. in
economics, whereas Anne got an M.A. in psychology. I had the good fortune of
having Ken Arrow as advisor and as dissertation supervisor. I benefitted very
much from discussing many finer points of economic theory with him. But I also
benefitted substantially by following his advice to spend a sizable part of
my Stanford time studying mathematics and statistics. These studies proved very
useful in my later work in game theory.
In 1958 Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got beastiality John C. - Harsanyi stories sex a very attractive Harsanyi forced John pics C. - teens C. forced erotic - John Harsanyi stories Кабель - C. Harsanyi ВВГ John т John по д проставки и опоры салону C. саб короба Harsanyi - стойки разное под research
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very isolated because at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia.
I turned to Ken Arrow for help. With his and Jim Tobin's help, I was appointed
Professor of Economics at Wayne State University in Detroit. Then, in 1964,
I became at first Visiting Professor and then Professor at the Business School
of the University of California in Berkeley. Later my appointment was extended
also to the Department of Economics. Our only child Tom was born in Berkeley.
In the early 1950s I published papers on the use of von Neumann-Morgenstern
utility functions in welfare economics and in ethics and on the welfare economics
of variable tastes.
My interest in game-theoretic problems in a narrower sense was first aroused
by John Nash's four brilliant papers, published in the period 1950-53, on cooperative
and on noncooperative games, on two-person bargaining games and on mutually
optimal threat strategies in such games, and on what we now call Nash equilibria.
In 1956 I showed the mathematical equivalence of Zeuthen's and of Nash's bargaining
models and stated algebraic criteria for optimal threat strategies.
In 1963 I extended the Shapely value to games without
transferable utility and
showed that my new solution concept was a generalization both of the Shapley
value and of Nash's bargaining solution with variable threats.
In a three-part paper published in 1967 and 1968, I showed how to convert a
game with incomplete information into one with complete yet imperfect information,
so as to make it acessible to game-theoretic analysis.
In 1973 I showed that "almost all" mixed-strategy Nash equilibria can be reinterpreted
as pure-strategy strict equilibria of a suitably chosen game with randomly fluctuating
payoff functions.
I also published a number of papers on utilitarian ethics.
I published four books. One of them, Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium
in Games and Social Situations (1977), was an attempt to unify game theory
by extending the use of bargaining models from cooperative games also to noncooperative
games. Two books, Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and Scientific Explanation
(1976), and Papers in Game Theory (1982), were collections of some of
my journal articles. Finally, A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in
Games (1988) was a joint work with Reinhard Selten. Its title indicates
its content.
Let me add that in 1993 and 1994 I wrote two, as yet unpublished papers, proposing
a new theory of equilibrium selection. My 1993 paper does so for games with
complete information, while my 1994 paper does so for games with incomplete
information. My new theory is based on our 1988 theory but is a much simpler
theory and is in my view an intuitively more attractive one.
I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, as well as a Distinguished
Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 1965-66 I was a Fellow of the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. I have an
honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Northwestern University. After my
retirement from my university, Reinhard
Selten edited a volume in my honor with
the help of H. W. Brock. It has the title, Rational Interaction.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1994, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1995
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
 
John C. Harsanyi died on August 9, 2000.