Emergence of Fairness Behavior Driven by Reputation-Based Voluntary Participation in Evolutionary Dictator Games

Recently, reputation-based indirect reciprocity has been widely applied to the study on fairness behavior. Previous works mainly investigate indirect reciprocity by considering compulsory participation. While in reality, individuals may choose voluntary participation according to the opponent's reputation. It is still unclear how such reputation-based voluntary participation influences the evolution of fairness. To address this question, we introduce indirect reciprocity with voluntary participation into the dictator game (DG). We respectively consider good dictators or recipients can voluntarily participate in games when the opponents are assessed as bad. We theoretically calculate the fairness level under all social norms of third-order information. Our findings reveal that several social norms induce the high fairness level in both scenarios. However, more social norms lead to a high fairness level for voluntary participation of recipients, compared with the one of good dictators. The results also hold when the probability of voluntary participation is not low. Our results demonstrate that recipients’ voluntary participation is more effective in promoting the emergence of fairness behavior.