Strategic Duality in Quantum Games

Kazuki Ikeda

Kazuki Ikeda, Shoto Aoki

Tsubasa Ichikawa, Izumi Tsutsui

Ismael Martínez-Martínez

Georgios D. Varsamis, Ioannis Liliopoulos, Hamed Mohammadbagherpoor +6 more

Quantum games extend classical game theory into the quantum realm by incorporating quantum players and quantum strategies. Two-player quantum games have been widely studied and applied, among other areas, in optimization and decision-making. In this work, we introduce, formalize and analyze a novel class of three-player quantum games, referred to as Proxy Quantum Games (PQGs). In this setting, one player, the Controller, influences or governs the strategic operations executed by a second player, the Proxy, who, in turn, competes directly against a third player, the Opponent. The strategic influence is implemented via controlled unitary operations, whereby the Proxy’s available strategies are conditioned on the Controller’s quantum state. We further generalize the PQG framework by incorporating multiple Controllers acting on a common Proxy, thereby enabling the study of higher-order strategic interactions and multi-agent influence structures. The objective under consideration is the maximization of the Controller’s expected payoff, under various configurations of strategic control and entanglement. Comparative analyses are conducted between the PQG formulation and conventional multiplayer quantum games, highlighting key differences in strategic behavior and payoff distributions.

Ahmad Ahsan Nawaz

We quantize prisoners dilemma, chicken game and battle of sexes to explore the effect of quantization on their strategic form. The games start with Werner-like state as an initial state. We show that for the measurement in entangled basis the strategic forms of these games remain unaffected by quantization. On the other hand when measurement is performed in product basis then these games could not retain their strategic forms.