John Harsanyi: Socialism

“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.”

John Harsanyi

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior , Game , Thinking

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior , Game , Understanding , Perfection

“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.”

John Harsanyi

Harsanyi, J. C. (1953). "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-taking". J. Polit. Economy 61 (5): p. 434

“We can regard the vector ci as representing certain physical, social, and psychological attributes of player i himself in that it summarizes some crucial parameters of player i's own payoff function Ui as well as the main parameters of his beliefs about his social and physical environment… the rules of the game as such allow any given player i to belong to any one of a number of possible types, corresponding to the alternative values of his attribute vector c i could take… Each player is assumed to know his own actual type but to be in general ignorant about the other players' actual types.”

John Harsanyi

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 171; As quoted in: Mertens, Jean-Francois, and Shmuel Zamir. " Formulation of Bayesian analysis for games with incomplete information http://jeremy-chen.org/sites/default/files/files/convexset/2013_01/formulation_of_bayesian_analysis_for_games_with_incomplete_information_mertens_and_zamir_1985.pdf." International Journal of Game Theory 14.1 (1985): p. 1-2

Game

“Following von Neumann and Morgenstern [7, p. 30], we distinguish between games with complete information, to be sometimes briefly called C-games in this paper, and games with incomplete information, to be called I-games. The latter differ from the former in the fact that some or all of the players lack full information about the "rules" of the game, or equivalently about its normal form (or about its extensive form). For example, they may lack full information about other players' or even their own payoff functions, about the physical facilities and strategies available to other players or even to themselves, about the amount of information the other players have about various aspects of the game situation, etc.
In our own view it has been a major analytical deficiency of existing game theory that it has been almost completely restricted to C-games, in spite of the fact that in many real-life economic, political, military, and other social situations the participants often lack full information about some important aspects of the "game" they are playing.”

John Harsanyi

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 163: Lead paragraph's

Life , Game