Would love to see cost-per-experiment breakdowns and quality benchmarks across model tiers. Does a local Llama 3.1 8B produce meaningful economic simulations or do you need the reasoning power of frontier models? This could be the difference between $5 and $500 experiments.
Scenario A: 100 agents × GPT-4o-mini × 500 steps Scenario B: 500 agents × local Llama 3-8B × 1,000+ steps
A quick table like "X agents × Y model × Z steps → tokens, $, convergence score" in the README would let new users budget experiments without having to read the whole paper plus run expensive experiments just to discover basic resource planning.
milkkarten•6mo ago
The system models decentralized governance, dynamic tax policy, and institutional evolution—entirely via in-context reinforcement learning, no fine-tuning required.
Full paper (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15815
slwvx•6mo ago
The right side of Fig 5a shows that your LLM tool has 80% tax for people making between 0 and $11.6k/year, then drops to about 30% for the next tax bracket, with other tax brackets moving around all over the place. This seems to be designed to induce people to NOT pay taxes.For all its faults, I think the US progressive system is fairly rational and does a pretty good job of inducing people to actually pay taxes [1]; specifically the (effectively) negative tax rate in the US for low-income people gets them in the habit of paying taxes. I.e. whatever underlying model of social welfare you are assuming to get the great social welfare on the right side of Fig 5a seems to not model real people. I wonder if some LLM hallucinations are going on under the hood to create the strange behavior in Fig 5a.
Some questions: You don't seem to model the US system of tax credits; is that right? Also, is there a Saez tax below $47.2k in Fig 5a? What about between $244k and $609k? I.e. is the Saez tax ever under the LLM tax?
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/governance/why-does-progressi...
milkkarten•6mo ago
Also, while there is a complicated tax code in the US, in our simulation there is no way for agents to avoid paying taxes :)
The Saez tax rates are perturbed from the LLM Economist's tax rates to find the theoretically optimal values according to the economic theory.
Thanks for the interest and I hope that this helps clarify some of the details.
slwvx•6mo ago
Ah, the fact that they are marginal rates makes marginally more sense, but it still seems to me that the SWF in fig 5a has very little relation to the real world.
> Also, while there is a complicated tax code in the US, in our simulation there is no way for agents to avoid paying taxes :)
Seems like an obvious thing to add. I.e. if you believe the World Bank when they say "People are more willing to pay tax when taxes are progressive" [1], then it seems worthwhile to update your model to include this.
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/governance/why-does-progressi...