EMNLP 2025

November 05, 2025

Suzhou, China

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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social science simulations. While their performance on reasoning and optimization tasks has been extensively evaluated, less attention has been paid to their ability to simulate the variability and adaptability of human decision-making. We propose a process-oriented evaluation framework with progressive interventions (Intrinsicality, Instruction, and Imitation) to examine how LLM agents adapt under different levels of external guidance and human-derived noise. We validate the framework on two classic economics tasks: irrationality in the second-price auction and decision bias in the newsvendor problem, demonstrating behavior gaps between LLMs and humans. We find that LLMs, by default, converge on stable and conservative strategies that diverge from observed human behaviors. Risk-framed instructions impact LLM behavior predictably but do not replicate human-like diversity. Incorporating human data through in-context learning narrows the gap but fails to capture the strategic variability of human subjects. These results highlight a persistent alignment gap in behavioral fidelity, suggesting that future LLM evaluations should consider more process-level realism. We present a process-oriented approach for assessing LLMs in dynamic decision-making tasks, offering guidance for their responsible application in synthetic data generation and social science research.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Investigating Value-Reasoning Reliability in Small Large Language Models
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Investigating Value-Reasoning Reliability in Small Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

+1Pengyuan Liu
Pengyuan Liu and 3 other authors

05 November 2025

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