The paper discusses the use of synthetic data in marketing research, arguing that the key question is not whether synthetic respondents work, but when they do. It categorizes synthetic data into three types—ungrounded LLM responses, segment-level personas, and individual-level digital twins—and maps each to the decisions they can support. The authors also propose a taxonomy of accuracy measures, highlight the forgotten question problem, and introduce an ex‑ante answerability diagnostic based on R² to improve twin-human correlation.
By Oded Netzer, Rajan Sambandam
AI‑moderated interviews are a scalable market‑research method that can match human moderation in depth, cover more themes, and recover more customer needs while keeping budgets constant. Participants, however, feel more emotionally engaged with live humans. Digital twins built from AI‑moderated data predict consumer responses better than demographics‑only personas, but the added richness does not improve quantitative predictions over static interviews, and prediction errors stem from differences in thinking styles and data‑distribution gaps.
By Yuting Deng, Jingxuan Liu, Olivier Toubia, Naman Jain
arXiv:2608.20344v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-based "digital twins" aim to simulate how an individual would behavein new environments or respond to novel questions, given some representation of...
By Iris Ye, Tianze Deng, Ozan Candogan
arXiv:2609.07987v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-based digital twins promise to reduce repeated human data collection by generating person- specific responses, yet existing evaluations provide lit...
By Steven Wang, Kyle Hunt, Shaojie Tang, Kenneth Joseph
arXiv:2601. 14264v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) act as digital twins for human respondents, yet their psychometric comparability remains uncertain.
By Yufei Zhang, Zhihao Ma
arXiv:2609.13148v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as synthetic consumer panels, promising $97\%$ cost reductions over traditional surveys. Yet aggregat...
By Robson Tigre, Hugo Gobato Souto