hankyoreh

Professors Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson (AP/Yonhap News)

Alvin Roth and Paul Milgrom, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics, have issued a joint statement criticizing J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard Law School who used game theory to describe the comfort women as prostitutes.

“The appeal Professor Ramseyer makes to game theory provides no support for his claims,” Roth and Milgrom, both professors at Stanford University, said in their statement, released on Feb. 27.

The two professors said they “have been thinking and talking about the article by Professor Ramseyer, which is distressing in so many ways,” adding that they “can’t help being reminded of Holocaust denial.”

“The soundness of an historical account should be judged based on a review of the evidence, which can never be overruled by some simple game theory model.”

Milgrom is regarded as an authority in several areas of economics, including auction and incentive theory, industrial economics, history of economics, and game theory. In 2020, Milgrom and another scholar were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their study of auction theory, which included human behavioral patterns and the characteristics of the auction market.

Alvin Roth was also a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 for his work in market design, as well as game theory.

In his controversial paper “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” Ramseyer, who specializes in legal studies, attempted to justify contracts given to the comfort women by using the economic concept of game theory.

“Comfort women” is a euphemistic term for women forced to work in a network of front-line brothels for the Japanese military during World War II.

According to Ramseyer, the women’s contracts were legitimate because they had demanded large sums of money up front in consideration of the potential damage to their reputation and the dangers of working as prostitutes so close to the battlefield.

But with authorities on game theory coming forward to object to Ramseyer’s argument, the logical flaws in his paper look even more glaring.

Roger Noll, Professor Emeritus of economics at Stanford University, issued a statement on Feb. 27 in which he sharply criticized the International Review of Law and Economics, which is planning to publish Ramseyer’s paper.

As someone who has published two papers in the International Review of Law and Economics, Noll said, he was very shocked and saddened by the journal’s plans and currently regretted his past decision to submit papers to that journal.

By Kim So-youn, staff reporter

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]