Chimera states in a network-organized public goods game with destructive agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates the emergence of chimera states in a networked public goods game involving cooperators, defectors, and destructive agents, revealing how these states influence collective cooperation dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic study of chimera states within evolutionary game theory, analyzing their formation, properties, and transitions in a networked social dilemma context.

Findings

Chimera states coexist with global synchronization in the model.

Transitions between states are first order and parameter-dependent.

Different numbers of coherent and incoherent clusters are observed.

Abstract

We found that a network-organized metapopulation of cooperators, defectors and destructive agents playing the public goods game with mutations, can collectively reach global synchronization or chimera states. Global synchronization is accompanied by a collective periodic burst of cooperation, whereas chimera states reflect the tendency of the networked metapopulation to be fragmented in clusters of synchronous and incoherent bursts of cooperation. Numerical simulations have shown that the system's dynamics alternates between these two steady states through a first order transition. Depending on the parameters determining the dynamical and topological properties, chimera states with different numbers of coherent and incoherent clusters are observed. Our results present the first systematic study of chimera states and their characterization in the context of evolutionary game theory. This provides a valuable insight into the details of their occurrence, extending the relevance of such states to natural and social systems.