The problem on the desk
How can a player reason strategically when an opponent’s payoffs or information are unknown? Harsanyi represented private information by types, allowing beliefs and contingent strategies to be handled within a Bayesian game.1
A life in moments
- 1920
Budapest
Born on 29 May.2
- 1953
University of Sydney · Sydney
Completed a master’s degree in economics.3
- 1961
Wayne State University · Detroit
Took a professorship in economics.4
- 1964
University of California, Berkeley · Berkeley
Joined the business school.5
- 1994
Nobel Foundation · Stockholm
Delivered his prize lecture on games with incomplete information.6
- 2000
Died on 9 August.2
Every line rests on a dated source (numbered below) unless it carries a mark: R for an inference, S for a story as told.
In their own words
Game theory is a theory of strategic interaction.
A story
A doctorate after the central ideas
Arrow recalled that Harsanyi arrived at Stanford with substantial economic knowledge and the ideas for his dissertation already developed. Arrow also cautioned that, while they discussed the work closely, he was not formally the thesis supervisor.7
Around Harsanyi
- doctoral advisor Kenneth J. Arrow MGP records Arrow; Arrow’s own memoir says that he was not the formal thesis supervisor.7
- built on the work Jean-François Mertens Mertens and Zamir’s 1985 paper gives a formal model of Harsanyi’s infinite belief hierarchies.9
Advisor in the record Kenneth Joseph Arrow Students in the record Bernhard Kitous, Hui-wen Koo Mathematics Genealogy Project record
The genealogy lists only what the database records; a missing name is not a missing teacher.
The card in the book
Economist born in Budapest, who left Hungary in 1950, took a master's degree in Sydney (1953) while working in factories, and after a Stanford doctorate (1959), working closely with Kenneth Arrow, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1964. He showed how games with incomplete information can be analysed by giving each player a type that summarises its beliefs, under a common prior — the construction this book uses from Chapter 0 on; the universal construction of belief hierarchies came later, from Mertens and Zamir — and shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Nash and Reinhard Selten.
Main works “Games with incomplete information played by ‘Bayesian' players, I–III” (Management Science 14, 1967–68); Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (1977).
To read further
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences (2001) · academy memoir
Sources (9)
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; pp. 114–115
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; p. 109
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; p. 110
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; pp. 113–114
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; p. 114
- Games with Incomplete Information, John C. Harsanyi, 1994; Title page, 9 December
- John C. Harsanyi, Kenneth J. Arrow; National Academy of Sciences, 2001; p. 113
- Games with Incomplete Information, John C. Harsanyi, 1994; Section 1, first sentence
- Formulation of Bayesian analysis for games with incomplete information, Jean-François Mertens and Shmuel Zamir, 1985; Authors’ abstract; IJGT 14(1), pp. 1–29
The facts on this page were gathered for the site from the sources listed, each checked against its locator; the book's card is reproduced unchanged.