You can look at your problem using already developed mathematical tools: theory of games, agent-based modeling, cellular automata, complex networks, and similar approaches.

There is already existing a huge amount of mathematical research along those lines that was directly applied in your filed or neighboring ones. Try to search there (do not hesitate to ask more).

Your intuition that only positively reinforced system are not optimal and not even suboptimal in solving the tasks is correct.

Negative factors in cash transfer in healthcare and research:

- large nodes (centers, money recipients) gets larger,

- competitors, especially those good ones are expelled,

- the diversity of the ecosystem decreases,

- monopolization,

- quantity over quality,

- unhealthy competition,

- corruption,

- a secret alliance between policy makers & money providers with recipients,

- more cleverness is invested in proving mediocre results than in discovering new valid solutions,

...

There is plenty of negative factors influencing the behavior under the consideration. Just go along those lines and you find all of them.