Giacomo Frigerio — University of Catania #
Chimera games emerging from coevolutionary dynamics with endogenous feedbacks #
Feedback between collective behavior and the environment is central to many complex systems, from climate change to financial markets, yet it is typically absent in standard evolutionary games.
Here, we introduce a model in which strategies and incentives coevolve: the game played at each time is a convex combination of two social dilemmas, weighted by the current level of cooperation. This endogenous feedback generates apparently irrational regimes—chimera games—where stable cooperation emerges even when classical theory would predict instability.
We further show that sufficiently large delays in the feedback induce sustained oscillations around both the equilibrium level of cooperation and the effective game, while variations in feedback strength reshape fixed points and long-term outcomes. Together, these results demonstrate how endogenous feedback fundamentally alters evolutionary predictions, opening new pathways for the emergence and persistence of cooperation.