Hart was born in Bucharest, Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1963. He received a B.Sc. in mathematics and statistics (summa cum laude, 1970) and an M.Sc. in mathematics (summa cum laude, 1971) from Tel Aviv University. His M.Sc. thesis was on the subject of "Values of Mixed Games" and was supervised by Robert Aumann, who was also his advisor in his doctoral thesis on "Cooperative Game Theory Models of Economic Equilibrium" (Ph.D., summa cum laude, 1976).
In 1979–1991 he was at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University, as professor since 1985. He was an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, Department of Operations Research, and Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University (1976–1979), and a visiting professor at the Department of Economics of Harvard University (1984–1985 and 1990–1991). Since 1991 he is a member of the Departments of Economics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Rationality (1991–1999) there.[1]
Research contributions
His main area of research is game theory and economic theory, with additional contributions in mathematics, computer science, probability and statistics.
Among his major contributions are studies of strategic foundations of cooperation; strategic use of information in long-term interactions ("repeated games"); adaptive and evolutionary dynamics, particularly with boundedly rational agents; perfect economic competition and its relations to models of fair distribution; riskiness; forecasting and calibration; mechanism design with multiple goods.
Hart edited, with Robert J. Aumann, the first three volumes of the Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications (1992, 1994, 2002).
In 2008, Presidential Address, GAMES 2008 - The Third World Congress of the Game Theory Society.
In 2009, he was invited to give the Harris Lecture at Harvard University.
In 2011, he was invited to give
the Kwan Chao-Chih Distinguished Lecture, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
In 2012, he was invited to give the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) Distinguished Lecture at Georgia Institute of Technology.