arXiv AI

Decision Models as Scalable Economic Surrogates that Capture Human Variation

Decision Models (DMs) are a new class of AI models that provide fast responses and output a probability distribution over a fixed set of options. In a first evaluation, 10 DMs were compared with 8 Large Language Models (LLMs) across three economic settings—a household spending survey, classic economic games, and a labour‑market field experiment. Frontier DMs, those scoring highest on general decision‑making benchmarks, reproduced human response variation more closely than LLMs in all settings, matched LLMs on modal responses in the spending survey, and were roughly ten times faster and over a hundred times cheaper than the fastest LLM.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Do LLMs Choose Like Humans? Using Cognitive Theory to Evaluate LLM Decision-Making

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) make decisions in ways that mirror human cognition. Using a new 140,000-trial product choice benchmark, the authors test 12 open‑source and commercial LLMs to see if their context sensitivity aligns with a cognitive economic theory that relies on problem categorization and attention allocation. While context prompts human‑like shifts in choice and problem categorization, it does not consistently reweight attention between features such as price and quality, and neither scaling nor chain‑of‑thought reasoning produces human‑like behavior. The findings indicate that LLM decision mechanisms differ from those of humans.

By Johnathan Sun, Andrei Shleifer, Yonatan Belinkov
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

arXiv:2602. 09802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists.

By Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals, Toon Calders, David Martens
arXiv AI
Aug 20

How AI Prompts Can Teach Us About the Structure of Human Behavior

The paper presents an AI-based method that uses a large language model to emulate human decision-making by assigning it a "type vector" describing traits such as Altruism and Risk Aversion. By varying these dimensions and values, the authors fit the model to over 119,000 decisions from 78,657 participants in 10 classic economic games, finding that three dimensions—Risk Aversion, Strategic Sophistication, and Trust—sufficiently capture human behavior. The resulting type clusters, fewer than a dozen, predict behavior in new games, suggesting a low-dimensional, portable representation of human behavior across diverse settings.

By Matthew O. Jackson, Benjamin S. Manning, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei