Now a value judgment on the distribution of income would show the required impersonality to the highest degree if the person who made this judgment h… - John Harsanyi

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.

In the period 1965 - 69, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency employed a group of about ten young game theorists as consultants. It was as a member of this group that I developed the simpler approach, already mentioned, to the analysis of I-games. I realized that a major problem in arms control negotiations is the fact that each side is relatively well informed about its own position with respect to various variables relevant to arms control negotiations, such as its own policy objectives, its peaceful or bellicose attitudes toward the other side, its military strength, its own ability to introduce new military technologies, and so on - but may be rather poorly informed about the other side's position in terms of such variables. I came to the conclusion that finding a suitable mathematical representation for this particular problem may very well be a crucial key to a better theory of arms control negotiations, and indeed to a better theory of all I-games.

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.