John Harsanyi

John Charles Harsanyi (actually János Károly Harsányi ; born May 29, 1920 in Budapest , † August 9, 2000 in Berkeley / California ) was a Hungarian - American economist . In 1994 he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics .

biography

Memorial plaque for Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and John Harsanyi, Budapest, Városligeti-Gasse 17-21

schooldays

In Budapest he attended the humanistic German-speaking Lutheran grammar school , one of the best schools in Hungary . Even John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963) were students here. He graduated in 1937. In the same year he won a national mathematics competition.

Studies and wartime

According to his parents' wishes, he studied pharmacy . The political situation in Germany at the time , which was already affecting Hungary , and the fact that as a student he did not initially have to do military service, induced him to quickly take up a degree.

Only when German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944 did he serve in the military from May to November 1944. After his imprisonment, he was faced with deportation to an Austrian concentration camp . However, he was able to escape in November 1944. Harsanyi then found shelter in a Jesuit monastery.

The experience of fascism also shaped his later ethical work. In it he spoke out in favor of ethics that can be specifically measured by a demonstrable benefit and that is not in the hands of any (political) institutions and can therefore quickly turn into fanaticism .

Post-war period and doctorate

After the war, in 1946, he re-enrolled at the University of Budapest to do his PhD in philosophy with sociology and psychology as minor . In June 1947 he received his doctorate. From September 1947 to June 1948 he worked at the Institute for Sociology. There he met his future wife Anne Klauber.

Second escape from Hungary

As a staunch anti-Marxist , Harsanyi had to give up his work at the University of Budapest in June 1948 and left Hungary illegally (together with Anne) in April 1950. After staying in Austria for several months, they both emigrated to Sydney , Australia, in December 1950 . There they married on January 2, 1951.

Time in australia

Harsanyi Hungarian qualifications were not recognized in Australia, he studied in the evening, after his factory work, economics . In 1953 he got his MA and in 1954 a teaching position at the University of Queensland in Brisbane . In 1956 he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , which enabled him to study at Stanford University for two years and to do his doctorate in economics. In 1958 he returned to Australia to the Australian National University in Canberra , as he got an attractive job there.

Moved to the USA

In Australia, however, Harsanyi soon felt isolated as a game theorist and so he returned (with the help of Kenneth Arrow , Nobel Prize in Economics 1972, and James Tobin , Nobel Prize in Economics 1981) to the USA, to Wayne State University in Detroit . He later became a professor in the business school at the University of California, Berkeley . His son was born there too.

After the political transformation in the Eastern Bloc in 1990, he visited his home country Hungary several times.

Scientific life

From a scientific point of view, JC Harsanyi mainly dealt with game theory between 1956 and 1973. He also published several writings on utilitarian ethics, mainly using rational decision-making for moral problems. The principle of average utility known in moral philosophy goes back to him, as well as the equal probability model , which describes the thought experiment of the “ veil of ignorance ” even before the philosopher John Rawls .

With his work Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (1977) he worked on a game-theoretical negotiation model developed by Frederik Ludvig Bang von Zeuthen in 1930 (see Zeuthen-Harsanyi model ).

Between 1964 and 1990 he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in 1994 (together with John F. Nash , Princeton University and Reinhard Selten , Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn ) for economics , with which his services in matters of non-cooperative game theory were honored. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.

Web links

Commons : John Harsanyi  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about John Harsanyi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1994 award to John Harsanyi
• News article remembering Dr. Harsanyi's life and career