Reinforced dynamics for interacting agents in competitive or cooperative environments

Abstract

We study systems of interacting reinforced stochastic processes, where agents' decisions evolve under reinforcement, network-mediated interactions, and environmental influences. In competitive environments with irreducible networks, we prove almost sure convergence of agents' states, with bipartite graphs leading to non-deterministic limits and non-bipartite graphs to deterministic ones. These results are extended to reducible networks with cooperative or competitive substructures, using a hierarchical graph representation in which higher-level agents perceive lower-level agents as forcing inputs. A general framework for interacting agents under external forcing is also provided, offering a rigorous characterization of long-term behavior and synchronization phenomena in such systems.