# CARD: Controlled Agentic Reddit Discussions for Credit Card Simulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09790/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 11 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11667/) (2023)
- [S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14984/) (2023)
- [OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11581/) (2024)
- [From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03563/) (2024)
- [ABIDES-Gym: Gym Environments for Multi-Agent Discrete Event Simulation and Application to Financial Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14771/) (2021)
- [A Synthetic Dataset for Personal Attribute Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07217/) (2024)
- [ABIDES: Towards High-Fidelity Market Simulation for AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12066/) (2019)
- [Simulating Financial Market via Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19966/) (2024)
- [ABIDES-Economist: Agent-Based Simulator of Economic Systems with Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09563/) (2024)
- [Understanding how social discussion platforms like Reddit are influencing financial behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04298/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online credit card discussions provide a natural setting for studying how consumers communicate about financial products. Simulating these discussions requires more than just generating individual comments, the generated threads should also match how real users express themselves and interact with others. We introduce CARD, a framework for generating realistic credit card discussion threads. Given a credit card post and its matched real thread, CARD uses non-verbatim guidance on reply structure, comment function, stance, tone, and conversational variation. A planner organizes these controls, a writer generates the discussion, and a calibration loop updates comments' populations that contribute to differences between the generated and real thread distributions. We evaluate CARD on real Reddit credit card discussions using lexical, semantic, behavioral, and structural metrics. CARD matches the distributions of real credit card discussions better than simulation baselines across multiple LLMs and also demonstrates smaller effect sizes and distribution distances across metrics. These results show that structured planning and targeted revision can generate the realism of simulated credit card discussions.