mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

arXiv 2606.17459 ↗First posted 16 Jun 2026cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Financial trading and forecasting agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce textscCEO-Bench, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation -- the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In textscCEO-Bench, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration -- the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 7 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.

Builds on

7 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence14 May

Other references · 6

  1. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
  2. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
  3. 2023Large Language Models as Optimizerscited by 830
  4. 2024STEER: Assessing the Economic Rationality of Large Language Modelscited by 26
  5. 2025EconEvals: Benchmarks and Litmus Tests for Economic Decision-Making by LLM Agentscited by 8
  6. 2026Large Language Models for Sequential Decision-Making: Improving In-Context Learning via Supervised Fine-Tuningcited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Can LLM Agents Be CFOs? Benchmarking Long-Horizon Resource Allocation in an Uncertain Enterprise Environment
  2. 2026EnterpriseBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Enterprise-Level Strategic Reasoning and Decision-Making
  3. 2025Noise, Adaptation, and Strategy: Assessing LLM Fidelity in Decision-Making
  4. 2025From Bits to Boardrooms: A Cutting-Edge Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Business Excellence
  5. 2026CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?
  6. 2025AIM-Bench: Evaluating Decision-making Biases of Agentic LLM as Inventory Manager
  7. 2025Predicting Effects, Missing Distributions: Evaluating LLMs as Human Behavior Simulators in Operations Management
  8. 2026ERPBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Enterprise Decision-Making Across Competitive Market Ecologies