John C. Harsanyi, Awarded Nobel Prize in 1994,

Lecture presented March 5, 1997.

John Harsanyi received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering studies of game theory, the rigorous formulation of appropriate behavior for rational persons who are in conflict with other rational persons. His findings have helped form the basis for the precise modeling of conflicts of company against company, subordinate against superior, interest group against interest group and nation against nation.

The Nobel Committee recognized Professor Harsanyi jointly with John F. Nash Jr. and Reinhard Selten “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.”

Quotes from John Harsanyi’s March 1997 lecture at Trinity University:

I was not an immediate success in Australia. My English was not very good and my Hungarian university degrees in pharmacy and philosophy were not recognized in Australia. It was clear that I would have to do factory work, which I did on and off for three years. Often I was unemployed because my manual skills were very deficient. I typically could not keep any factory job for more than a few days. Sometimes I would keep a job for a couple of weeks, but this was the exception. ... I enrolled at the University of Sydney as an evening student. I did so as a student in economics…I loved the logical elegance of economic theory.

Another important interest of mine was game theory. My interest was aroused by three brilliant articles of John Nash ... published in the period between 1950 and 1953. When I studied economics at the University of Sydney I was very disappointed to learn that classical economists did not provide a unique rational solution for the bargaining problem. …I was very impressed to find that John Nash had a very clear mathematical answer to the question and this answer was based on certain axioms which looked to me to be very plausible. ... I showed that Nash’s bargaining theory happened to be mathematically equivalent to a much earlier bargaining theory by the Danish economist Zeuthen.

Additional resources on John Harsanyi are available at the Nobel web site.

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