Eur. Phys. J. B (2016) 89: 162
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-70052-4

Regular Article

A quantum extension to inspection game

¹ School of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, P.R. China
² Center for Quantitative Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, 37232, USA
³ Institute of Integrated Automation, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, P.R. China
⁴ Big Data Decision Institute, Jinan University, Tianhe, Guangzhou 510632, P.R. China
⁵ Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, 37232, USA
⁶ Research Center for Mathematics and Economics, Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin 300222, P.R. China
⁷ Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Engineering Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, 816-8580, Japan

^a e-mail: prof.deng@hotmail.com
^b e-mail: zhenwang0@gmail.com

Received: 23 January 2016
Received in final form: 14 March 2016
Published online: 4 July 2016

Abstract

Quantum game theory is a new interdisciplinary field between game theory and system engineering research. In this paper, we extend the classical inspection game into a quantum game version by quantizing the strategy space and importing entanglement between players. Our results show that the quantum inspection game has various Nash equilibria depending on the initial quantum state of the game. It is also shown that quantization can respectively help each player to increase his own payoff, yet fails to bring Pareto improvement for the collective payoff in the quantum inspection game.