Exit policies leverage cooperation and economic performance

Many real-world social dilemmas involve individuals who strategically hesitate or withdraw, a behavior that is not captured by models restricted to cooperation and defection, and is often missed by three-strategy models that ignore realistic network structure and mobility. We therefore study an evolutionary game with three strategies: cooperate, defect and exit, where policy parameter ϑ quantifies the population coverage of the exit option. To improve societal relevance, we embed mobility in a multiplex framework that combines empirical social networks with BA scale-free layers. We show that allowing exit strategy benefits cooperators through two complementary mechanisms. First, the exit strategy provides a viable alternative for individuals who hesitate or become trapped in unfavorable interactions, preventing their exploitation and stabilizing cooperative clusters. Second, exiting individuals form a spatial buffer that limits the spread of defectors and creates room for cooperators to persist and expand. We further quantify the macro-level consequences of exit policies and find that, rather than imposing a lasting burden, exit allowances can increase net income and per capita income while reducing inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient. The fiscal outlay is short-lived and small relative to the long-run gains. Finally, we show that the allowance level is a tunable policy instrument: when 0 < η < R, organizations can adjust the allowance η to match financial constraints and developmental stages, thereby promoting fairer resource distribution that supports cooperative norms and improves economic efficiency. Our results provide a policy-oriented framework for engineering cooperation while enhancing economic performance.