# EconWebArena: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Economic Tasks in Realistic Web Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07718/) (2024)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11944/) (2023)
- [WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05930/) (2024)
- [The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05467/) (2024)
- [AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15711/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Foundation Agent for Financial Trading: Tool-Augmented, Diversified, and Generalist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18485/) (2024)
- [WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12373/) (2024)
- [WHEN FLUE MEETS FLANG: Benchmarks and Large Pre-trained Language Model for Financial Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00083/) (2022)
- [VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06327/) (2024)
- [VisualWebBench: How Far Have Multimodal LLMs Evolved in Web Page Understanding and Grounding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05955/) (2024)
- [WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05291/) (2024)
- [CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02305/) (2024)
- [BBT-Fin: Comprehensive Construction of Chinese Financial Domain Pre-trained Language Model, Corpus and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09432/) (2023)
- [MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09992/) (2024)
- [VideoWebArena: Evaluating Long Context Multimodal Agents with Video Understanding Web Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19100/) (2024)
- [EconLogicQA: A Question-Answering Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Economic Sequential Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07938/) (2024)
- [RealWebAssist: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Web Assistance with Real-World Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10445/) (2025)
- [Economics Arena for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01735/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08523/) (2026)
- [CRMAgent: A Multi-Agent LLM System for E-Commerce CRM Message Template Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08325/) (2025)
- [AutoBnB-RAG: Enhancing Multi-Agent Incident Response with Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13118/) (2025)
- [Empowering Real-World: A Survey on the Technology, Practice, and Evaluation of LLM-driven Industry Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17491/) (2025)
- [MacAgentBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World macOS Desktop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22557/) (2026)
- [EconSkills: Studying Skill Transfer and Retrieval for Web Agents on Live Economic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19523/) (2026)
- [AgentBnB: A Browser-Based Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise with Large Language Model Support and Retrieval-Aligned Scaffolding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00265/) (2025)
- [How Long Is a Piece of String? A Brief Empirical Analysis of Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11518/) (2026)
- [AutoMARS: Automatic and Scalable Multi-Agent Large Language Model Framework for Supply Chain Risk Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17206/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce EconWebArena, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on complex, multimodal economic tasks in realistic web environments. The benchmark comprises 360 curated tasks from 82 authoritative websites spanning domains such as macroeconomics, labor, finance, trade, and public policy. Each task challenges agents to navigate live websites, interpret structured and visual content, interact with real interfaces, and extract precise, time-sensitive data through multi-step workflows. We construct the benchmark by prompting multiple large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate tasks, followed by rigorous human curation to ensure clarity, feasibility, and source reliability. Unlike prior work, EconWebArena emphasizes fidelity to authoritative data sources and the need for grounded web-based economic reasoning. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs as web agents, analyze failure cases, and conduct ablation studies to assess the impact of visual grounding, plan-based reasoning, and interaction design. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps and highlight persistent challenges in grounding, navigation, and multimodal understanding, positioning EconWebArena as a rigorous testbed for economic web intelligence.