Since the establishment of von Neumann and Nash's concept of equilibrium, game theory has become a universal language in economics and social sciences. However, classical game theory is deeply rooted in the mechanistic worldview, and its deterministic assumptions, static equilibrium, and individualistic methodology are becoming increasingly inadequate in explaining the emergence of cooperation, uncertainty, and complex social interactions. This book directly faces this dilemma and introduces the core concepts of quantum mechanics into game analysis, constructing a complete system of quantum game theory. Starting from the century long evolution of game theory, the entire book deeply criticizes the mechanistic nature of classical game theory, and re establishes the philosophical foundation of game theory through practical ontology. On this basis, this book proposes the hypothesis of a "quantum gamer" and constructs a complete analytical framework from superposition strategy space, quantum entanglement to measurement collapse. The system reconstructs core areas such as quantum zero sum games, quantum non-zero sum games, quantum prisoner's dilemma, quantum coordination games, quantum evolutionary games, quantum cooperative games, and quantum incomplete information games, and extends them to cutting-edge directions such as quantum repetitive games, quantum game learning, and quantum mechanism design. At the application level, this book comprehensively demonstrates the broad prospects of quantum game theory in fields such as economics, political science, sociology, biology, computer science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and ethics. This book emphasizes that quantum entanglement enables cooperation to emerge, and quantum measurement leads equilibrium from static to dynamic collapse, thus surpassing the explanatory boundaries of classical game theory. The book has a rigorous structure and in-depth arguments, combining theoretical originality with interdisciplinary perspectives, providing a groundbreaking work for researchers, graduate students, and cutting-edge explorers to understand the quantum game revolution.
Since the establishment of von Neumann and Nash's concept of equilibrium, game theory has become a universal language in economics and social sciences. However, classical game theory is deeply rooted in the mechanistic worldview, and its deterministic assumptions, static equilibrium, and individualistic methodology are becoming increasingly inadequate in explaining the emergence of cooperation, uncertainty, and complex social interactions. This book directly faces this dilemma and introduces the core concepts of quantum mechanics into game analysis, constructing a complete system of quantum game theory. Starting from the century long evolution of game theory, the entire book deeply criticizes the mechanistic nature of classical game theory, and re establishes the philosophical foundation of game theory through practical ontology. On this basis, this book proposes the hypothesis of a "quantum gamer" and constructs a complete analytical framework from superposition strategy space, quantum entanglement to measurement collapse. The system reconstructs core areas such as quantum zero sum games, quantum non-zero sum games, quantum prisoner's dilemma, quantum coordination games, quantum evolutionary games, quantum cooperative games, and quantum incomplete information games, and extends them to cutting-edge directions such as quantum repetitive games, quantum game learning, and quantum mechanism design. At the application level, this book comprehensively demonstrates the broad prospects of quantum game theory in fields such as economics, political science, sociology, biology, computer science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and ethics. This book emphasizes that quantum entanglement enables cooperation to emerge, and quantum measurement leads equilibrium from static to dynamic collapse, thus surpassing the explanatory boundaries of classical game theory. The book has a rigorous structure and in-depth arguments, combining theoretical originality with interdisciplinary perspectives, providing a groundbreaking work for researchers, graduate students, and cutting-edge explorers to understand the quantum game revolution.
Abstract Since Adam Smith, economics has erected a grand edifice upon the foundations of rational agents, equilibrium analysis, and linear causality; however, the 2008 global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic have successively revealed its fundamental limitations when confronted with complex economic phenomena: bubbles that ought not to have existed, crises unforeseen by equilibrium models, non-linear ruptures brought about by technological revolutions, and self-fulfilling expectations—all of which call for a richer theoretical language. This book serves as the foundational introduction to the "Quantum Economics Textbook Series," as well as the first gateway into this entire series. It introduces the methodological framework, mathematical apparatus, and philosophical insights of quantum mechanics to economic analysis, grounding its approach in the core proposition of a practical ontology—that human economic practice itself possesses quantum attributes such as superposition, entanglement, constructibility, uncertainty, and emergence—thereby reconstructing the economic world as a quantum process of superposition and evolution. Six core concepts—superposition, entanglement, measurement collapse, the uncertainty principle, quantum transitions, and emergence—run throughout the work. Quantum economics does not represent a simple negation of classical theory; rather, it constitutes a dialectical sublation: under the classical limit—where decoherence is complete, the measurement basis is fixed, and entanglement vanishes—quantum theory precisely reduces to classical theory. This book comprises five parts and thirty chapters: Part I establishes the paradigm shift and theoretical framework, covering critiques of Newton's worldview, the quantum worldview, a foundational conceptual framework, mathematical foundations, and research methodologies; Part II reconstructs quantum microeconomic theory, encompassing consumers, producers, pricing, markets, the wave-particle duality of markets, quantum games, and welfare economics; Part III builds quantum macroeconomic theory, addressing national income accounting, money, inflation, economic cycles, policy, and open economies; Part IV explores quantum finance and market dynamics, including asset pricing, portfolio management, market sentiment, risk management, and trading theory; Part V extends the scope to organizations, innovation, institutions, development, economic ethics, and the digital economy, while offering insights into the future of this discipline. This volume is intended for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in economics and related fields, and serves as the essential first volume in the quantum economics series.
This volume of the Quantum Economics Textbook Series is devoted to quantum human economics. For more than a century, mainstream economics has imagined its object as a clockwork: an agent is endowed with complete and stable preferences and full information, solves for a unique optimum under given constraints, and the market glides toward equilibrium along a mechanical orbit. With the solemnity of its logic and the beauty of its geometry, this system has become the gateway through which generation after generation enters the discipline. Yet precisely at the foundation of this system the cracks have grown unmistakable. Classical models, at the level of their axioms, delete superposition, interference, entanglement, measurement collapse, and the waxing and waning of coherence; they therefore struggle to accommodate multiple equilibria, path dependence, network effects, herding, critical collapse, and deep uncertainty. The quantum reconstruction offered here does not treat quantum physics as an ornamental metaphor. It re-founds, on the ground of practical ontology, the mathematical and conceptual architecture that quantum theory has forged for a complex world, and transplants it onto quantum human economics. Classical and neoclassical insights are recovered as special cases in the limit of complete decoherence. The whole book unfolds in a unified state–operator–evolution formalism. Each chapter first explains the classical theory thoroughly, then presents an original quantum construction, rigorous derivation, a real historical case, and a dialogue with the great economists; equations are rendered precisely as native Word math objects, and figures and tables are drawn expressly to support the argument. The book suits undergraduates building intuition, graduate students and researchers advancing to the frontier, and practitioners in policy and business.
Abstract Microeconomics represents the most formally formalized branch of the social sciences. Yet its core actor—the rational agent endowed with complete and consistent preferences, who maximizes a well-defined utility function without hesitation—does not exist in laboratory experiments, market transactions or real household decision-making. Behavioral economics has dismantled this myth, only to replace it with a disjoint catalogue of separate “effects” and “anomalies”: different effects yield contradictory predictions, and researchers select effects ex post to rationalize all observed outcomes. A discipline that explains everything case by case can barely generate ex ante predictions. This monograph is the first work worldwide to systematically reconstruct quantum microeconomics. Human preferences and beliefs possess a mathematical structure isomorphic to quantum states: prior to a decision, alternative options coexist in superposition; choice constitutes a measurement that constructs preferences; question order alters responses because judgments correspond to incompatible observables; interacting individuals become mutually entangled. Framing effects, order effects, preference reversals and herding behavior are no longer a mere inventory of biases, but predictable signatures emerging from a unified underlying process. This book does not argue that the human brain operates as a physical quantum machine. It posits instead that the mathematical structure of human choice is isomorphic to quantum statesarXiv. The book is organized into six parts. Part I, Paradigm Revolution, diagnoses the century-long crisis of the classical paradigm, traces its mechanistic legacy from Newton to Walras, establishes the philosophical foundations of practical ontology and observation dependence, puts forward the quantum agent hypothesis, and assembles the analytical framework for the entire volume. Part II develops quantum consumer theory, reconstructing preferences, utility, choice, demand and welfare measurement on the basis of superposition. Part III builds quantum producer theory, covering production, costs, supply, the theory of the firm, and profit maximization. Part IV addresses quantum market structure and game theory, treating perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and games as entangled quantum systems. Part V reconstructs quantum general equilibrium and market failure, including general equilibrium theory, welfare economics, externalities, public goods and asymmetric information. Part VI extends the framework to factor markets for labor, capital and land, synthesizes behavioral microeconomics, and charts future disciplinary frontiers. The book balances unity and depth, originality and rigor, formal rigor and readability. Within an axiomatic framework, it derives core macroeconomic phenomena from a small set of quantum principles. Each chapter contains original theoretical construction, formal mathematical derivation and real-world applications, with purpose-built diagrams to substantiate arguments. This volume is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers, policy practitioners, and all readers who seek to understand why economies boom and collapse.
Abstract In the current context, where the productivity paradox coexists with growing concerns about inequality, quantum economics and quantum game theory are emerging as novel frameworks to address inherent uncertainty and complex strategic interactions. Quantum game theory applies the principles of quantum mechanics to model strategic interactions, providing new insights into decision-making, optimization and conflict resolution. In this article, we conduct a systematic review following the PRISMA methodology and a bibliometric analysis of the literature on quantum game theory to assess its development, methodologies and applications. We examine the growing interest in quantum technologies such as quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum simulation, which have had a significant impact on both theoretical models and practical economic and social systems. By mapping trends in the quantum game theory research landscape, this article aims to identify key advances, highlight important milestones and propose future directions for research in this emerging field. This comprehensive mapping not only elucidates the dynamic evolution and interdisciplinary convergence of quantum and evolutionary game theory, but also establishes a foundation for future research, fostering innovative approaches to complex decision-making in increasingly uncertain and interconnected environments.
This work concentrates on simultaneous move non-cooperating quantum games. Part of it is evidently not new, but it is included for the sake self consistence, as it is devoted to introduction of the mathematical and physical grounds of the pertinent topics, and the way in which a simple classical game is modified to become a quantum game (a procedure referred to as a quantization of a classical game). The connection between game theory and information science is briefly stressed, and the role of quantum entanglement (that plays a central role in the theory of quantum games), is exposed. Armed with these tools, we investigate some basic concepts like the existence (or absence) of a pure strategy and mixed strategy Nash equilibrium and its relation with the degree of entanglement. The main results of this work are as follows: 1) Construction of a numerical algorithm based on the method of best response functions, designed to search for pure strategy Nash equilibrium in quantum games. The formalism is based on the discretization of a continuous variable into a mesh of points, and can be applied to quantum games that are built upon two-players two-strategies classical games, based on the method of best response functions. 2) Application of this algorithm to study the question of how the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibrium is related to the degree of entanglement (specified by a continuous parameter γ ). It is shown that when the classical game GC has a pure strategy Nash equilibrium that is not Pareto efficient, then the quantum game GQ with maximal entanglement (γ = π/2) has no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. By studying a non-symmetric prisoner dilemma game, it is found that there is a critical value 0γc such that for γγc there is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium and for γ≥γc there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. The behavior of the two payoffs as function of γ starts at that of the classical ones at (D, D) and approaches the cooperative classical ones at (C, C) (C = confess, D = don’t confess). 3) We then study Bayesian quantum games and show that under certain conditions, there is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium in such games even when entanglement is maximal. 4) We define the basic ingredients of a quantum game based on a two-player three strategies classical game. This requires the introduction of trits (instead of bits) and quantum trits (instead of quantum bits). It is proved that in this quantum game, there is no classical commensurability in the sense that the classical strategies are not obtained as a special case of the quantum strategies.
Since its emergence in the 1970s, behavioral economics has integrated psychological insights into economics—drawing on Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, Thaler's psychological accounting and boost theory, and Schiller's behavioral finance—thereby dismantling the myth of the "homo economicus" and revealing systematic cognitive biases inherent to human decision-making. However, classical behavioral economics has been constructed from a collection of fragmented "effects" and "biases," lacking a unified, axiomatic mathematical framework; moreover, the frequent practice among researchers to selectively apply individual effects has undermined the discipline's predictive power and theoretical coherence. This book is the first academic monograph in the world to systematically expound on quantum behavioral economics—a new paradigm devised specifically to overcome this fundamental dilemma. It introduces concepts such as Hilbert spaces, state vectors, superposition, entanglement, measurement collapse, quantum probability, interference effects, unitary evolution, decoherence, non-commutative observables, and quantum phase transitions into the foundational bedrock of behavioral economics: that preferences and beliefs coexist in a superposition prior to decision-making; that decision-making consists of constructing measurements to extract definite preferences via measurement collapse; and that the beliefs and behaviors of individuals are entangled, exhibiting non-local quantum correlations. Furthermore, it posits that the sequence in which information is presented and the framing effects are intrinsic properties of quantum decision-making—rather than mere "biases." This book comprises six parts and thirty chapters: Part I, "Paradigm Revolution," establishes the philosophical foundations, the quantum subject hypothesis, and the analytical framework; Part II develops quantum probabilistic judgments, quantum heuristics, quantum prospect theory, quantum decision-making under uncertainty, and quantum framing effects; Part III explores quantum preferences, quantum utility, quantum choice theory, quantum endowment effects and loss aversion, as well as the current state of quantum research and default effects; Part IV extends the scope to quantum social preferences, quantum altruism, quantum trust and cooperation, quantum game theory, and quantum public goods games; Part V examines quantum intertemporal choice, quantum hyperbolic discounting, quantum self-control, quantum procrastination and addiction, and quantum habit formation and behavioral change across temporal dimensions; Part VI demonstrates the application of framing in finance, markets, public policy, and health domains, while offering insights into the future of this discipline. This work pursues three overarching objectives: theoretical unification and depth, originality and authority, and seamless readability. It is intended for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in behavioral economics, decision science, psychology, and finance, as well as for public policy makers and practitioners in financial markets to provide new paradigm-based analytical tools.