John Charles Harsanyi (Hungarian: Harsányi János Károly; May 29, 1920 – August 9, 2000) was a Hungarian-American economist who spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley.

[7] As a pharmacology student, Harsanyi escaped conscription into the Royal Hungarian Army which, as a person of Jewish descent, would have meant forced labor.

However, in 1944 (after the fall of the Horthy regime and the seizure of power by the Arrow Cross Party) his military deferment was cancelled and he was compelled to join a forced labor unit on the Eastern Front.

[6][8] After seven months of forced labor, when the German authorities decided to deport his unit to a concentration camp in Austria, John Harsanyi managed to escape and found sanctuary for the rest of the war in a Jesuit house.

[7] Harsanyi spent the academic year 1947–1948 on the faculty of the Institute of Sociology of the University of Budapest, where he met Anne Klauber, his future wife.

He was forced to resign the faculty because of openly expressing his anti-Marxist opinions, while Anne faced increasing peer pressure to leave him for the same reason.

[10] In 1956, Harsanyi received a Rockefeller scholarship that enabled him and Anne to spend the next two years in the United States, at Stanford University and, for a semester, at the Cowles Foundation.

After working for a short time as a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, Harsanyi became frustrated with the lack of interest in game theory in Australia.

[11] From 1966 to 1968, Harsanyi was part of a team of game theorists tasked with advising the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in collaboration with Mathematica, a consulting group from Princeton University led by Harold Kuhn and Oskar Morgenstern.

[10] As he says at the beginning of his essay included in the book edited by A. Sen and B. Williams (see below), he tries to reconcile three traditions of Western moral thinking, those of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and the utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick and Edgeworth).

After moving to the US on a Rockefeller Fellowship where he was supervised by Kenneth Arrow, Harsanyi was influenced by Nash's publications on game theory and became increasingly interested in the topic.