Quantum Prisoner's Dilemma and High Frequency Trading on the Quantum Cloud

Abstract

High-frequency trading (HFT) offers an excellent user case and a potential killer application of the commercially available, first generation quasi-quantum communication and computation technologies. To this end, we offer here a simple but complete game-theoretic model of HFT as the famous two player game, Prisoner's Dilemma. We explore the implementation of HFT as a game on the (quasi) quantum cloud using the Eisert, Wilkens, and Lewenstein quantum mediated communication protocol, and how this implementation can increase transaction speed and improve the lot of the players in HFT. Using cooperative game-theoretic reasoning, we also note that in the near future when the internet is properly quantum, players will be able to achieve Pareto-optimality in HFT as an instance of reinforced learning.