On the contributions of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash and Reinhard Selten

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 1994 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash and Reinhard Selten for ‘their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games’. The Academy justifies giving the prize in economics to three game theorists by the argument that strategic interaction characterizes many economic situations and that, therefore, game theory has proved very useful in economic analsyis. Today, 50 years after the publication of Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, game theory, and, in particular, its non-cooperative branch has become a dominant tool for analyzing economic issues. In this note, the author briefly reviews and appraises the laureates’ fundamental contributions to game theory and the economic sciences.