Rational quantum secret sharing

The traditional quantum secret sharing does not succeed in the presence of rational participants. A rational participant’s motivation is to maximize his utility, and will try to get the secret alone. Therefore, in the reconstruction, no rational participant will send his share to others. To tackle with this problem, we propose a rational quantum secret sharing scheme in this paper. We adopt the game theory to analyze the behavior of rational participants and design a protocol to prevent them from deviating from the protocol. As proved, the rational participants can gain their maximal utilities when they perform the protocol faithfully, and the Nash equilibrium of the protocol is achieved. Compared to the traditional quantum secret sharing schemes, our scheme is fairer and more robust in practice.