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.
By Maxime Saxena, Fabio Caccioli, R. Maria del Rio-Chanona
arXiv:2606. 17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost.
By Joel Persson, M{\aa}rten Schultzberg, Sebastian Ankargren
arXiv:2607. 26348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic users, stand-ins for human respondents whose simulated answers feed product, policy, and market decisions.
By Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Nico Zheng
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:2603. 23433v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents are becoming active decision-makers on the Internet.
By Giulio Frey, Kawin Ethayarajh
Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) has been widely recognized as an effective framework for characterizing such behavioral patterns.
arXiv:2607. 20471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalization, the act of varying a message to induce action from a specific receiver while keeping sender, channel, and time fixed, has a long tradition in psychology and marketing as a two-party problem in which sender and receiver have independent objectives.
By Ashutosh Srivastava, Siddharth Yedlapati, Vinay Aggarwal, Yaman Kumar Singla, Shashwat Dixit, Jitendra Ajmera, Balaji Krishnamurthy
arXiv:2608.10503v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, accurately evaluating their latent values and biases is critical. T...
By Davood Wadi, Mohsen Ghodrat, Matthew Philp
The paper introduces Prompts to Proxies (P2P), a two‑stage inference‑time system that uses structured attribute‑based prompting and entropy‑guided sampling to build a diverse proxy pool, followed by L1‑regularized regression to create a compact weighted ensemble that matches aggregate survey responses. P2P achieves low mean squared error on American Trends Panel data and competitive performance on World Values Survey cross‑locale experiments, outperforming baseline prompting and demographic‑conditioning methods while using minimal training data. The authors argue that this preference reconstruction approach offers a lightweight, externally verifiable alternative for aligning large language model proxies with target human populations.
By Bingchen Wang, Zi-Yu Khoo, Jingtan Wang
The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) can be fine‑tuned with observational data to improve alignment with human preferences and business goals. It highlights that directly using such data can cause models to learn spurious correlations, and introduces DeconfoundLM, a method that removes known confounders from reward signals. Experiments show that DeconfoundLM better recovers causal relationships and outperforms baseline methods by over 16% in objective score when confounding is present.
By Erfan Loghmani
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.
By Manuel Tonneau, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Niyati Malhotra, Sharif Kazemi, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Ana Mar\'ia Mu\~noz Boudet, Lakshmi Subramanian, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Valentin Hofmann
arXiv:2610.07563v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to meet a key goal in economics: a quantitative model of household decision making, across a variety of...
By Jin Huang, Diego Ferreras Garrucho, Yutong Xie, Walter M. Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei, Chen Lian, Jonathon Hazell