Harsanyi, John C.

Harsanyi, John C. (Charles)

(1920–  ) economist, educator; born in Budapest, Hungary. After completing his studies through the Ph.D. (1947) at the University of Budapest, he immigrated to Australia in 1950. There he took an M.A. at the University of Sydney (1953) and was a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland (1954–56). In 1956 he came to the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow at Stanford University. He became a research associate with the Cowles Foundation at Yale University (1957) and took a Ph.D. at Stanford (1959). He went back to Australia to become a senior fellow at the Australian National University (1959–61), then returned to the U.S.A. to become a professor of economics at Wayne State University (1961–63). In 1964 was appointed a visiting professor of economics at the Haas School of Business at the University of California: Berkeley; he became a full professor in 1965, later also becoming the Flood Research Professor in Business Administration, positions he held until taking emeritus status in 1990. One of his main areas of work involved the formal study of rationality in human affairs, specifically in taking ethical positions or making moral judgments. His other area was game theory, the application of mathematics to formulating rational behavior in conflicts among rational persons. His various publications include Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium (1977) and (with Reinhard Selten) A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (1988). For his contributions to game theory, Harsanyi shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economic science with John F. Nash, an American, and Reinhard Selten, a German.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.