# Pay What LLM Wants: Can LLM Simulate Economics Experiment with 522 Real-human Persona?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03262 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03262/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [Can language models learn from explanations in context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02329/) (2022)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11501/) (2023)
- [Do LLM Agents Exhibit Social Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15198/) (2023)
- [HAE-RAE Bench: Evaluation of Korean Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02706/) (2023)
- [LLM economicus? Mapping the Behavioral Biases of LLMs via Utility Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02784/) (2024)
- [Examining Identity Drift in Conversations of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00804/) (2024)
- [Large Scale Multi-Lingual Multi-Modal Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06560/) (2023)
- [Exploring Persona-dependent LLM Alignment for the Moral Machine Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10886/) (2025)
- [Shadows in the Attention: Contextual Perturbation and Representation Drift in the Dynamics of Hallucination in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16894/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Item-Mean Surrogates: Why Richer Persona Data Fail to Improve LLMs as Human Surrogates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29455/) (2026)
- [Behavioral History Outperforms Descriptions of the Person for LLM Synthetic Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03998/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated significant interest in their capacity to simulate human-like behaviors, yet most studies rely on fictional personas rather than actual human data. We address this limitation by evaluating LLMs' ability to predict individual economic decision-making using Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing experiments with real 522 human personas. Our study systematically compares three state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs using detailed persona information from 522 Korean participants in cultural consumption scenarios. We investigate whether LLMs can accurately replicate individual human choices and how persona injection methods affect prediction performance. Results reveal that while LLMs struggle with precise individual-level predictions, they demonstrate reasonable group-level behavioral tendencies. Also, we found that commonly adopted prompting techniques are not much better than naive prompting methods; reconstruction of personal narrative nor retrieval augmented generation have no significant gain against simple prompting method. We believe that these findings can provide the first comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' capabilities on simulating economic behavior using real human data, offering empirical guidance for persona-based simulation in computational social science.