用大模型模拟真实人口,设计更优税收政策。
LLM Economist: Large Population Models and Mechanism Design in Multi-Agent Generative Simulacra
- 底层工人用人口数据生成,按文本效用最大化决策。
- 上层规划者用强化学习设计分段线性税率,提升整体福利。
- 全程自然语言操作,适合政策模拟与社会实验研究。
我们提出 LLM Economist 框架,通过基于代理的建模,在具有层级决策结构的战略环境中设计与评估经济政策。底层为受限理性工人代理,基于美国人口普查校准的收入与人口统计数据生成,通过上下文学习的文本效用函数优化劳动供给。上层规划代理采用上下文强化学习,提出锚定于当前美国联邦税级的分段线性边际税率方案。该框架使经济仿真具备三大能力:(i)异质效用优化,(ii)大规模、人口统计学真实的代理群体生成,(iii)完全以自然语言表达的机制设计——即“行为引导”问题。在最多一百个交互代理的实验中,规划者收敛至近似斯塔克尔伯格均衡,相比萨伊兹方案提升了总体社会福利;同时,定期进行的人格化投票程序在去中心化治理下进一步增强了收益。结果表明,基于大语言模型的代理可协同建模、仿真与治理复杂经济系统,为社会尺度的政策评估提供可操作的试验平台,助力构建更优文明。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We present the LLM Economist, a novel framework that uses agent-based modeling to design and assess economic policies in strategic environments with hierarchical decision-making. At the lower level, bounded rational worker agents -- instantiated as persona-conditioned prompts sampled from U.S. Census-calibrated income and demographic statistics -- choose labor supply to maximize text-based utility functions learned in-context. At the upper level, a planner agent employs in-context reinforcement learning to propose piecewise-linear marginal tax schedules anchored to the current U.S. federal brackets. This construction endows economic simulacra with three capabilities requisite for credible fiscal experimentation: (i) optimization of heterogeneous utilities, (ii) principled generation of large, demographically realistic agent populations, and (iii) mechanism design -- the ultimate nudging problem -- expressed entirely in natural language. Experiments with populations of up to one hundred interacting agents show that the planner converges near Stackelberg equilibria that improve aggregate social welfare relative to Saez solutions, while a periodic, persona-level voting procedure furthers these gains under decentralized governance. These results demonstrate that large language model-based agents can jointly model, simulate, and govern complex economic systems, providing a tractable test bed for policy evaluation at the societal scale to help build better civilizations.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。