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Quantum contracts between Schrödinger and a cat

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Abstract

Viewing quantum information as economic commodity, we provide a fundamental viewpoint toward a quantum theory of contracts. In particular, a generic quantum protocol of the principal–agent relation is formulated in a framework of quantum games, and quantum models of moral hazard problem and adverse selection are addressed. New infrastructures are about to be created by the development of quantum technology, which will have a revolutionary impact on people’s economic activities. In other words, the time will come in the near future when people will conduct their economic activities on the complex Hilbert space. However, this kind of economic activity is not envisioned at all in conventional economics, so a new theory is literally needed. These problems include public and private interests of exchanging quantum commodity, market design and contracts, for example. In this article, We present a quantum contract theory based on this new fulcrum, and solve the problem of information asymmetry between principal and agent, which has long been a central issue in classical contract theory.

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Notes

  1. This story is inspired by Doraemon [6].

  2. By using Formulation 2, one can consider entanglement between agent’s type and messages.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Shoto Aoki, Dmitri Kharzeev, Yushi Mura, and Hiroki Wada for collaborations and useful discussion. I wish to thank three anonymous independent reviewers of Quantum Information Processing for their appropriate feedback. This work was supported by PIMS Postdoctoral Fellowship Award.

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  1. Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Centre for Quantum Topology and its Applications (quanTA), University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5E6, Canada

    Kazuki Ikeda

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Correspondence to Kazuki Ikeda.

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Ikeda, K. Quantum contracts between Schrödinger and a cat. Quantum Inf Process 20, 313 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-021-03252-4

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