Chimera states in a network-organized public goods game with mutations

We show that a network-organized metapopulation of cooperators, defectors and destructors 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 (in)coherent clusters are observed. Our results present the first example of chimera states 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.