19 Facts About John Harsanyi

John Charles Harsanyi was a Hungarian-American economist who spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley.

John Harsanyi was the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.

John Harsanyi made important contributions to the use of game theory and economic reasoning in political and moral philosophy as well as contributing to the study of equilibrium selection.

John Harsanyi moved to the United States in 1956, and spent most of his life there.

John Harsanyi's parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism a year before he was born.

John Harsanyi attended high school at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest.

John Harsanyi won the first prize in the Eotvos mathematics competition for high school students.

However, because of the start of World War II, John Harsanyi returned to Hungary to study pharmacology at the University of Budapest, earning a diploma in 1944.

John Harsanyi later abandoned Catholicism, becoming an atheist for the rest of his life.

John Harsanyi was forced to resign the faculty because of openly expressing his anti-Marxist opinions, while Anne faced increasing peer pressure to leave him for the same reason.

John Harsanyi remained in Hungary for the following two years attempting to sell his family's pharmacy without losing it to the authorities.

John Harsanyi later explained to his new wife that she had promised to cook better food than she usually did.

In 1956, John Harsanyi received a Rockefeller scholarship that enabled him and Anne to spend the next two years in the United States, at Stanford University and, for a semester, at the Cowles Foundation.

At Stanford John Harsanyi wrote a dissertation in game theory under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow, earning a second PhD in economics in 1959, while Anne earned an MA in psychology.

John Harsanyi resolved the problem of how players could make decisions while not knowing what each other knows by modelling the situation with initial moves by Nature using known probabilities to choose the parameters, with some players observing Nature's move but other players just knowing the probabilities and the fact that some players have observed the actual realized values.

From 1966 to 1968, John Harsanyi was part of a team of game theorists tasked with advising the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in collaboration with Mathematica, a consulting group from Princeton University led by Harold Kuhn and Oskar Morgenstern.

John Harsanyi died on August 9,2000, from a heart attack in Berkeley, California, after developing Alzheimer's disease.

John Harsanyi began researching utilitarian ethics in the mid-fifties at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

John Harsanyi is considered one of the most important exponents of the "rule utilitarianism".