Divergent Minds, Convergent Baselines: A Bounded-Rationality Account of LLM-Human Strategic Behaviour (opens in new tab)

Researchers have started using LLM agents in place of human subjects in behavioural and political-science experiments, often as a cheaper substitute for laboratory pools. The substitution does not hold up in strategic settings: humans and LLMs reliably make different choices, and neither fine-tuning on human response data nor persona conditioning has closed the gap. The behavioural-economics literature has, since Simon's introduction of bounded ...