biography
| name: |
Harsanyi, John C(harles)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1920–2000)
|
| biography:
| Economist and educator, born in Budapest, Hungary. After completing his studies through a PhD (1947) at the University of Budapest, he emigrated to Australia (1950). There he took an MA at the University of Sydney (1953) and was a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland (1954–6). In 1956 he went to the USA as a Rockefeller Fellow at Stanford University, became a research associate with the Cowles Foundation at Yale University (1957), and took a PhD at Stanford (1959). He went back to Australia to become a senior fellow at the Australian National University (1959–61), then returned to the US to become a professor of economics at Wayne State University (1961–3). In 1964 he 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 behaviour 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, he shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics with John F Nash (USA) and Reinhard Selten (Germany). |
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