What the report covers

The assignment compares opening crises in Japan and Joseon with tools from game theory, including the prisoner's dilemma and a game of nerve or attrition. The honest way to write it is to get the games right first, then ask how far an analogy can go.

Some source copy reads as if 1853 and 1871 were already extensive-form problems solved by backward induction, and as if later modernization or colonization were the payoffs. That is a story laid on the past. It is not how the games, or the history, should be taught.

The games, stated exactly

In the prisoner's dilemma, defection is dominant and mutual defection is the equilibrium, even though both prefer mutual cooperation. A war of attrition or a game of chicken has a different structure: standing firm can be costly, backing down can be costly in another way, and mixed or asymmetric equilibria are often the point.

A 'credible threat' is a technical claim about what a player would still do at a later node. It is not a compliment for military resolve. If you use the term, say which game you are in.

The historical events, kept within what we can name

Commodore Perry's squadron reached Japan in 1853, and treaties followed in 1854 under severe pressure. The 1871 United States expedition to Korea, known in Korean as Shinmiyangyo, was a violent encounter, not a formal 'opening' in the same sense as the later 1876 Treaty of Ganghwa with Japan. These dates can be cited from a standard history.

What the courts were trying to protect, what they knew, and how later decades unfolded, are matters for historians. A game-theory paper can sketch alternative moves only if it labels them as a model, not as the hidden logic of the time.

Limits of the analogy

' Do not treat Meiji industrialization or Japanese colonization of Korea as the terminal nodes of an 1853 or 1871 game. End the paper by saying which formal game you used, which historical fact you cited, and where the analogy stops.

Sources

1. Osborne, M. J. (2004). An introduction to game theory. Oxford University Press (prisoner's dilemma, chicken, and wars of attrition as formal games).
2. A standard history of the Perry arrival (1853–54) and of the 1871 United States expedition to Korea (Shinmiyangyo), from a named academic or official history, not from a newspaper's payoff story.
3. Do not treat a later newspaper column as proof that nineteenth-century states were applying Nash equilibrium. Game theory as a formal field is mid-twentieth-century.

Last updated: November 13, 2026