mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Economy of Minds: Emerging Multi-Agent Intelligence with Economic Interactions

arXiv 2606.02859 ↗First posted 1 Jun 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.MAcited by 5

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Abstract (arXiv)

How can a population of agents self-orchestrate and self-adapt into stronger collective intelligence without centralized control? Inspired by Friedrich Hayek's economic theory of decentralized coordination in markets, we study this question through an agent economy in which agents compete via auctions for the right to act, exchange payments, and accumulate wealth from environmental rewards. These simple local incentives induce decentralized credit assignment, driving global planning without explicit orchestration or communication protocols. The population evolves through economic selection: effective agents accumulate wealth and are mutated via exploitation, while ineffective ones go bankrupt and are replaced via exploration. Using modern Large Language Model (LLM) based agents, we show that, initialized with weak agents, the agent economy produces emergent multi-step reasoning strategies and outperforms stronger monolithic baselines across five agentic tasks, including mathematical reasoning, financial research, scientific research, accelerator design, and distributed-system optimization. Our results suggest a new path to multi-agent intelligence: rather than engineering coordination, we can design decentralized incentive structures under which it automatically emerges.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

Builds on

40 of 53 references.

References · 40

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,371
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  4. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,988
  5. 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,808
  6. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,784
  7. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,332
  8. 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Developmentcited by 919
  9. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 867
  10. 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?cited by 604
  11. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policiescited by 465
  12. 2017Deep Decentralized Multi-task Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observabilitycited by 148
28 more
  1. 2025Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Foldingcited by 148
  2. 2025Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systemscited by 138
  3. 2026Learning to Discover at Test Timecited by 115
  4. 2025Multiagent Finetuning: Self Improvement with Diverse Reasoning Chainscited by 95
  5. 2025AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemscited by 90
  6. 2025MAPoRL: Multi-Agent Post-Co-Training for Collaborative Large Language Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 86
  7. 2025Finance Agent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLMs on Real-world Financial Research Taskscited by 65
  8. 2025ThetaEvolve: Test-time Learning on Open Problemscited by 64
  9. 2019Gemmini: Enabling Systematic Deep-Learning Architecture Evaluation via Full-Stack Integrationcited by 63
  10. 2025Multi-Agent Verification: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Multiple Verifierscited by 62
  11. 2025Multi-Agent Evolve: LLM Self-Improve through Co-evolutioncited by 60
  12. 2025Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Researchcited by 54
  13. 2026CORAL: Towards Autonomous Multi-Agent Evolution for Open-Ended Discoverycited by 52
  14. 2026FrontierScience: Evaluating AI's Ability to Perform Expert-Level Scientific Taskscited by 47
  15. 2026Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharingcited by 36
  16. 2025ReSo: A Reward-driven Self-organizing LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Reasoning Taskscited by 31
  17. 2025CoMAS: Co-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Interaction Rewardscited by 29
  18. 2022ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Taskscited by 18
  19. 2026The Agent Economy: A Blockchain-Based Foundation for Autonomous AI Agentscited by 7
  20. 2025Slm-mux: Orchestrating small language models for reasoningcited by 6
  21. 2026Dynamic Role Assignment for Multi-Agent Debatecited by 5
  22. 2025DOSA: Differentiable Model-Based One-Loop Search for DNN Acceleratorscited by 4
  23. 2025QuArch: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Reasoning in Computer Architecturecited by 3
  24. 2026AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlementcited by 3
  25. 2026Reliability and Effectiveness of Autonomous AI Agents in Supply Chain Managementcited by 3
  26. 2025Market-based Architectures in RL and Beyondcited by 1
  27. 2025A Role-Aware Multi-Agent Framework for Financial Education Question Answering with LLMscited by 1
  28. 2025The Emergence of Complex Behavior in Large-Scale Ecological Environmentscited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

  1. 2026From AGI to ASIcited by 4
  2. 2026Markets, Not Planners: Decentralized Orchestration of LLM Agents with Private Informationcited by 2
  3. 2026AgentDSE: Reasoning-Augmented Architectural Design Space Explorationcited by 0
  4. 2026Thinking Outside the Box: Can Language Models Rely on External Guidance Selectively?cited by 0
  5. 2026Price of Anarchy of First-Price Auctions in Agentic Marketscited by 0

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  4. 2026AgentSociety: Incentivizing Agentic Social Intelligence
  5. 2026AgentEconomist: An End-to-end Agentic System Translating Economic Intuitions into Executable Computational Experiments
  6. 2026Information Limits and Attractor Dynamics in Economies of Frontier LLM Agents: A Pre-Registered Test
  7. 2025The Agentic Regulator: Risks for AI in Finance and a Proposed Agent-based Framework for Governance
  8. 2024Beyond the Sum: Unlocking AI Agents Potential Through Market Forces