Mechanism Design for Systemic Quantum Cyber Risk: Game-Theoretic Equilibria and Algorithms

Systemic quantum cyber risk emerges when cryptographic transitions, quantum-enabled adversaries, and tightly coupled digital infrastructures interact to produce cascading failures that cannot be understood through component-level security analysis alone. This manuscript develops a mechanism-design perspective for governing such risk under deep uncertainty, where actors possess heterogeneous incentives, private information, and asymmetric capabilities. The core argument is that quantum cyber resilience is an equilibrium property of socio-technical systems: it depends on how incentives, information flows, and resource allocations shape collective behavior across firms, sectors, and jurisdictions. The book provides a research-ready conceptual architecture that links uncertainty modeling and study design to statistical explanation and causal inference, machine-learning prediction and trustworthiness, and big-data engineering for reproducible analytics lifecycles. Building on this architecture, the manuscript offers implementable designs for contracts, audits, and regulatory instruments that elicit truthful reporting, align investments in post-quantum migration, and reduce correlated vulnerabilities. It concludes with applied sectoral horizons and governance practices that translate analytic outputs into decision tools for policymakers, industry leaders, and research teams operating across South Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Keywords mechanism design, systemic risk, quantum cybersecurity, post-quantum cryptography, game theory, incentive compatibility, information asymmetry, robust optimization, causal inference, statistical modeling, trustworthy machine learning, distribution shift, scalable analytics, reproducibility, MLOps, risk governance, critical infrastructure, audit design, policy instruments