c — competition intensity: how strongly participants must outperform one another to survive. Dimensionless; 0 means no rivalry.
α — aggregation speed: how quickly the institution’s design updates toward what its participants are doing. A rate, in units of the participants’ own adaptation timescale (1 = institution and participants adapt equally fast).
λ — legibility gap: the extra payoff to proxy-optimizing per unit of institutional catering, measured relative to the intrinsic payoff of staying value-aligned (fixed at d = 1).