Evolutionary Dynamics of Reputation-Based Voluntary Prisoner’s Dilemma Games

Cooperation underlies many natural and artificial systems. While voluntary participation can sustain cooperation without informational assumptions, real interactions are rarely anonymous, leaving the joint effects of participation and reputation insufficiently understood. We propose a reputation-based voluntary prisoner's dilemma, in which agents incur a monitoring cost to inspect opponents and decide whether to exit an interaction for a fixed incentive to avoid exploitation or to default to cooperation or defection. We show that reputation-conditioned exit generates multiple coexistence pathways that sustain cooperation across population structures. In well-mixed populations, cooperation persists through stable mixed coexistence, whereas in structured populations, the exit-incentive-dependent regimes emerge, including local cyclic dominance and persistent oscillations. Together, these results extend voluntary participation frameworks and underscore the role of exit-incentive design in cooperative multiagent systems.