Behavior decision making, where individuals can efficiently express their preferences for all options, has a great impact on cooperation. Hereby, we institute a minimal model in well-mixed populations where whether and how to sanction defectors are decided by cooperators via different decision-making mechanisms. The results illustrate that whether cooperation can outbreak depends on the cooperators' preferences for sanction and complying with the electoral outcome. We highlight the role of individuals' preferences in the emergence of cooperation and show that there exists an intermediate degree of the cooperators' preference for sanction at which the cooperators' preference for complying with the electoral outcome has a negligible impact on cooperation. We point out whether conformity facilitates the emergence of cooperation depends on the cooperators' preference for sanction. We find, compared with individual decision making, whether collective decision making is more conducive to promoting cooperation crucially depends on cooperators' preferences as well as the consensus required for employing sanction.

• Received 24 July 2020
• Revised 2 November 2020
• Accepted 4 November 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.052414