Quantum Energy Teleportation Enters the World of Markets and Games

Economics has always borrowed its metaphors from physics, from the notion of equilibrium to the idea of market forces. Now the borrowing is running in the other direction, and it is no longer metaphorical. A new theoretical study by Kazuki Ikeda of the University of Massachusetts Boston and Stony Brook University, published in the journal Quantum Information Processing, argues that a genuine quantum phenomenon called quantum energy teleportation can be treated as a tradable commodity, and that once it is, entire families of classical economic models acquire quantum versions with strikingly different outcomes. The work sketches the foundations of what the author calls Quantum Information Economics, a field in which superposition, entanglement and measurement are not decorative analogies but actual resources that shape strategic behavior.

To understand why this is more than wordplay, it helps to start with the physics. Quantum energy teleportation, first proposed by Masahiro Hotta in 2008, is a protocol that allows energy to be extracted at a distant location by exploiting entanglement in the ground state of a many-body quantum system. In an ordinary quantum system, the ground state is the lowest-energy configuration, and a local region of it can appear as a so-called passive state, one from which no work can be extracted by local operations alone. Yet the region is not isolated: it is entangled with its surroundings. If a distant party performs a measurement on their part of the system and communicates the result over a classical channel, the recipient can apply a conditional operation tailored to that outcome. The measurement injects energy locally at the sender’s site, and the conditional operation at the receiver’s site then unlocks energy that was previously inaccessible, effectively delivering usable energy without any physical carrier traveling between the two points.

The protocol respects all the usual physical constraints. No energy travels faster than light, because the classical communication of the measurement outcome is essential, and the sender must pay an energy cost that, as Ikeda proves rigorously in the paper, is always at least as large as the total energy delivered to the receivers. The proof relies on the fact that the ground state minimizes the total energy, so any manipulation that raises the energy of the sender’s region must account for the energy extracted elsewhere. What makes the protocol economically interesting is precisely this structure: a supplier pays a cost, consumers receive a benefit, and the accounting between them is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics rather than by contract law. Ikeda demonstrated the protocol experimentally on IBM superconducting quantum processors, using pairs of qubits on the ibm_strasbourg, ibm_sherbrooke and ibm_kyiv devices, with modern error mitigation techniques such as matrix-free measurement mitigation and zero-noise extrapolation to extract clean signals from noisy hardware.

With this physical substrate in place, the paper builds economic machinery on top of it. The central move is to treat teleported energy as a commodity and the entangled ground state as a shared resource, then to ask what happens to classical game-theoretic models when players can additionally choose quantum strategies. In classical game theory, following John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and John Nash, a game is defined by players, strategies and payoffs, and an equilibrium is a set of strategies from which no player benefits by deviating alone. Ikeda extends this framework by allowing strategies to be quantum operations, including measurements and conditional unitary gates, which means the space of possible actions is vastly larger than in the classical setting. New equilibria appear that have no classical counterpart, and in some cases the quantum strategies allow players to escape dilemmas, such as the free-rider problem, that are unavoidable when strategies are restricted to classical choices.

The paper works through a remarkable range of standard industrial organization models. Ikeda constructs quantum versions of the Bertrand and Cournot duopoly models, the two canonical frameworks for describing competition between firms. In Cournot competition, firms choose quantities and the market price adjusts; in Bertrand competition, firms choose prices and consumers buy from the cheapest supplier. When firms can share or trade entangled resources and deploy quantum strategies, the resulting equilibria differ from the classical ones, offering unconventional ways to divide the market or to extract surplus. The analysis extends to monopoly, to Hotelling-style location games in which firms choose where to position themselves along a market, to contestable markets where the threat of entry disciplines incumbents, and to perfect competition. In each case the quantum layer does not simply reproduce the classical results with extra steps; it introduces genuinely new strategic possibilities rooted in the correlation structure of entangled states.

Perhaps the most provocative applications concern public goods and incentive problems. Moral hazard, the situation in which an agent’s effort cannot be perfectly observed by a principal, has been a cornerstone of contract theory since Bengt Holmström’s 1979 work on observability. Free riding on public goods, analyzed classically by Paul Samuelson and others, similarly arises because individual contributions are hard to verify or reward. Ikeda shows that quantum energy teleportation offers a lens on these problems: because the measurement and feedback operations in the protocol are verifiable parts of a physical process, and because entanglement creates correlations that cannot be replicated classically, agents can be given incentives that depend on quantum information. The paper unveils strategies that transcend classical limits, suggesting that in a future quantum economy, the design of contracts and contribution mechanisms might exploit resources that classical mechanism design cannot even describe.

The study also reaches into matching theory, the branch of economics founded on the Gale-Shapley algorithm that underlies everything from school choice to organ exchange. Ikeda incorporates entangled resources into matching models and proves that stable and optimal allocations can be achieved in settings where the participants’ payoffs are tied to quantum states. In his formalism, a matching corresponds to a configuration whose total payoff is encoded in a Hamiltonian, and a stable matching is the ground state of that Hamiltonian, with penalty terms ensuring that no participant has an incentive to block the outcome. The proofs in the paper’s appendix show that the ground state satisfies individual rationality, meaning no participant prefers to opt out, which is exactly the stability condition that market designers care about. This connection between quantum many-body physics and market stability is one of the paper’s most elegant technical contributions.

None of this is pure abstraction. Ikeda’s earlier work demonstrated quantum energy teleportation on real superconducting hardware in 2023, and the new paper includes a detailed appendix on the experimental methods, showing how mid-circuit measurements and conditional operations are implemented, how noise is mitigated, and how the latest Eagle-generation processors run the protocol ten to one hundred times faster than the devices used two years earlier. The programming code for the simulations and experiments is publicly available under an MIT license on the author’s GitHub repository. Related results by other groups, including experimental activation of strongly passive states and proposals for quantum key distribution based on teleportation protocols, indicate a rapidly maturing research area in which the physics of entanglement and the engineering of quantum processors advance together.

The intellectual lineage of the paper is also worth noting. The idea that information is physical traces back through Maxwell’s demon, Leo Szilard’s analysis of measurement and entropy, and the work of Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett. Quantum money, proposed by Stephen Wiesner in the 1980s and developed by later researchers, showed that quantum states could serve as unforgeable economic objects. Ikeda’s own 2022 paper with Shumpei Aoki on quantum games and quantum economic behavior laid the groundwork for the present synthesis. What is new here is the scale of the ambition: rather than treating one economic object quantum mechanically, the paper rebuilds an entire toolkit of microeconomics, from auctions and mechanism design to repeated games and cooperative solution concepts like the Shapley value, on quantum foundations.

Caveats remain, as they must in any nascent field. The models are theoretical, the demonstrations are small-scale, and no one knows whether entangled energy markets will ever exist outside the laboratory. Yet the paper makes a serious case that the question is worth asking. If quantum networks eventually distribute entanglement as routinely as fiber optics distribute bandwidth, then the economics of that distribution, including who pays for measurements, who profits from teleported energy, and how stable allocations are reached, will need a theory. Quantum Information Economics, as sketched in this work, is an early attempt to provide one, and it suggests that the strategic landscape of a quantum-enabled economy may be richer, and stranger, than anything classical game theory has imagined.

Subject of Research: Quantum energy teleportation as a commodity in quantum game theory and economic models

Article Title: Quantum games and economics through teleportation

Article References: Ikeda, K. (2026). Quantum games and economics through teleportation. Quantum Information Processing, 25(10), Article 331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-026-05341-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11128-026-05341-8

Keywords: quantum energy teleportation, quantum game theory, Quantum Information Economics, entanglement, Bertrand competition, Cournot duopoly, moral hazard, public goods, matching theory, market design, superconducting qubits, quantum networks