Foregoers

János (John C.) Harsányi (1920-) was born in Budapest, and educated at one of the best schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, with such distinguished alumni as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner.

He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics together with John Nash and Reinhard Selten „for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games”. Harsányi showed how social games can be analyzed even when in possession of faulty information. He thus laid the groundwork for a fast developing research sector, the economics of information, taking note of strategic situations where individual participants are unaware of each other’s intentions.