  Motivated by the recent interest in models of guarded (co-)recursion we study
its equational properties. We formulate axioms for guarded fixpoint operators
generalizing the axioms of iteration theories of Bloom and Esik. Models of
these axioms include both standard (e.g., cpo-based) models of iteration
theories and models of guarded recursion such as complete metric spaces or the
topos of trees studied by Birkedal et al. We show that the standard result on
the satisfaction of all Conway axioms by a unique dagger operation generalizes
to the guarded setting. We also introduce the notion of guarded trace operator
on a category, and we prove that guarded trace and guarded fixpoint operators
are in one-to-one correspondence. Our results are intended as first steps
leading to the description of classifying theories for guarded recursion and
hence completeness results involving our axioms of guarded fixpoint operators
in future work.
