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Simulating Human Strategic Behavior: Comparing Single and Multi-agent LLMs

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arxiv 2402.08189 v2 pith:UOL3AFM3 submitted 2024-02-13 cs.HC

Simulating Human Strategic Behavior: Comparing Single and Multi-agent LLMs

classification cs.HC
keywords llmsreasoninghumansimulatepeoplestrategicmulti-agentsingle
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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When creating policies, plans, or designs for people, it is challenging for designers to foresee all of the ways in which people may reason and behave. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to simulate human reasoning. We extend this work by measuring LLMs ability to simulate strategic reasoning in the ultimatum game, a classic economics bargaining experiment. Experimental evidence shows human strategic reasoning is complex; people will often choose to punish other players to enforce social norms even at personal expense. We test if LLMs can replicate this behavior in simulation, comparing two structures: single LLMs and multi-agent systems. We compare their abilities to (1) simulate human-like reasoning in the ultimatum game, (2) simulate two player personalities, greedy and fair, and (3) create robust strategies that are logically complete and consistent with personality. Our evaluation shows that multi-agent systems are more accurate than single LLMs (88 percent vs. 50 percent) in simulating human reasoning and actions for personality pairs. Thus, there is potential to use LLMs to simulate human strategic reasoning to help decision and policy-makers perform preliminary explorations of how people behave in systems.

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