arXiv AI By Maxime Saxena, Fabio Caccioli, R. Maria del Rio-Chanona

Decision Models as Scalable Economic Surrogates that Capture Human Variation

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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.

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