[HUNGARY-2000] New York Times: Harsanyi Janos, Nobel dijas, elhunyt
Kalman Toth
MAGYAR KIVONAT
Harsanyi Janos "jatek elmeletert" kapott Nobel dijat a gazdasag tudomanya
teruleten. 1944-ben a vonatra varva munkataborba valo deportalasba, Janos
levette puloveret a sargacsilaggal es szabad emberkent elhagyta a
palyaudvart. A TRIANON-i szerzodes alairasa elott szuletett nehany nappal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER
ohn C. Harsanyi, who won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science
for his work on game theory, died on Wednesday in Berkeley, Calif.
Mr. Harsanyi, 80, was a professor at the Haas School of Business at the
University of California at Berkeley, for 25 years until 1990. He had
Alzheimer's disease and died of a heart attack at home in Berkeley,
according to his son, Tom.
A Hungarian of Jewish descent, Mr. Harsanyi barely escaped from the
forced-labor unit he was drafted into outside Budapest near the end of Worl=
d
War II. While waiting at a crowded railway station to be deported to a mine=
,
Mr. Harsanyi removed his sweater with its yellow star and walked away, his
son said.
A guard stopped him and asked him what he was doing there. Mr. Harsanyi,
according to his son, said: "I am here to visit one of my Jewish friends wh=
o
is going to be deported. I think it is important that we stand by our
friends in their time of need." The guard let him go. Tom Harsanyi said tha=
t
of the workers in the forced- labor unit, only his father and three others,
who jumped from the train, survived.
Mr. Harsanyi won the Nobel award for his work in game theory, which
concentrates on competition among players, using mathematics to forecast th=
e
outcome of games, like chess, and also trade wars, hostile takeovers, price
wars and other political and economic conflicts. Unlike theories used to
explain the interaction in a market of many participants, game theory deals
with the fact that when there are just a few players, all of them have to
worry about the response of their opponent.
Mr. Harsanyi shared the award with two other economists, John F. Nash of
Princeton University and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn. Mr. Nas=
h
laid out the basic principles of game theory, but he assumed that the
players all shared the same information and were driven by self-interest.
Mr. Harsanyi made the theory work when rivals did not know much at all abou=
t
what the other planned to do. He did this, in part, by assigning
probabilities to the possible moves of the players and the outcomes.
"He found a way to allow people to think systematically about markets in
which there were a small number of players who had access to different
information," said John Quigley, a professor of economics at Berkeley and
the former chairman of the economics department.
"For a large set of circumstances, game theory is the way people think
today," Mr. Quigley said. Mr. Harsanyi's work, Mr. Quigley added, "was
instrumental in making economic theory fit the imperfect world in which we
live."
Mr. Harsanyi was born in Budapest on May 29, 1920. His parents were Jewish
but converted to Catholicism before he was born. He was raised as a
Catholic. His main interests were in mathematics and philosophy. But becaus=
e
of the political uncertainty of the time, he earned a degree in pharmacolog=
y
so that he could work in his father's pharmacy. He was drafted into the
forced-labor unit after Germany occupied Hungary during World War II.
After the war, Mr. Harsanyi remained in Hungary, earning a doctorate in
philosophy from the University of Budapest. He was an assistant professor o=
f
sociology at the univeristy until the late 1940's, when his views clashed
with those of the Communist government. He quit his job and returned to wor=
k
in his father's pharmacy.
In 1950, he escaped over the border to Austria with his future wife, Anne,
and traveled to Australia. He married Anne on Jan. 2, 1951, three days afte=
r
arriving in Sydney.
He went to the University of Sydney at night to earn a master's degree in
economics and became a lecturer in economics at the University of Queenslan=
d
in Brisbane in 1954. But his son, Tom, said that his father felt that he
could not be effective in his field from Australia. So in 1956, he enrolled
in the Ph.D. program in economics at Stanford University and studied under
Kenneth Arrow, a future Nobel winner in economics.
He returned to Australia to teach economics at the Australian National
University from 1958 to 1961 and then returned to the United States to Wayn=
e
State University in Detroit from 1961 to 1963. He went to the Haas School a=
t
Berkeley in 1964 as a visiting professor and became a full professor in
1965. He was appointed a professor in the Berkeley economics department in
1966.
In 1964, before Mr. Harsanyi developed his procedure for dealing with game
theory players with incomplete information, he was asked to be one of 10
game theorists to advise the United States Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency on negotiations with the Soviet Union. The 10 advisers said they
could not help because both "players" had too little information about the
other side.
Mr. Harsanyi is survived by his wife, Anne, of Berkeley, and his son, of
Somerville, Mass.
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