John Harsanyi Quotes
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In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.
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In 1958, Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got a very attractive research position at the Australian National University in Canberra. But soon I felt very isolated because at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia.
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I knew that as a pharmacy student I would obtain military deferment. As I was of Jewish origin, this meant that I would not have to serve in a forced labor unit of the Hungarian army.
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In its first 30 years of existence, up to the mid 1970s, the practical applications of game theory were very limited, probably as a result of excessive preoccupation by game theorists with cooperative solution concepts.
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We can regard the vector c
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If somebody prefers an income distribution more favorable to the poor for the sole reason that he is poor himself, this can hardly be considered as a genuine value judgment on social welfare.
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If two objects or human beings show similar behaviour in all their relevant aspects open to observation, the assumption of some unobservable hidden difference between them must be regarded as a completely gratuitous hypothesis and one contrary to sound scientific method.
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After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.
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My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave us a comfortable living. As I was their only child, they wanted me to become a pharmacist. But my own preference would have been to study philosophy and mathematics.
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Game theory is a theory of strategic interaction. That is to say, it is a theory of rational behavior in social situations in which each player has to choose his moves on the basis of what he thinks the other players’ countermoves are likely to be.
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One might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis.
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In 1946, I re-enrolled at the University of Budapest in order to obtain a Ph.D. in philosophy with minors in sociology and in psychology.
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My interest in game-theoretic problems in a narrower sense was first aroused by John Nash's four brilliant papers, published in the period 1950-53, on cooperative and on noncooperative games, on two-person bargaining games and on mutually optimal threat strategies in such games, and on what we now call Nash equilibria.
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It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.