John C. Harsanyi, system builder and conceptual innovator (Q5954140)

This essay was written in 1991 on the occasion of the 70th birthday of the noted Hungarian game theorist, economist, and philosopher John C. Harsanyi (born 1920). It is reprinted here without update. The author is a close friend and collaborator of Harsanyi's whose unusual life as a doctor of pharmacy, refugee from communist Hungary, factory worker in Australia, and finally professor of business administration at Berkeley is described in the concluding biographical remarks. Without giving technical details, Selten stresses Harsanyi's general solution to the theory of cooperative games (connected to the work of J. F. Nash), his reduction of incomplete information in game theory to imperfect information and his contributions to utilitarian ethics, and the philosophy of science.