Joy Buchanan, Joshua Foster
arXiv 28 Jul 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2607.26288 · PDF · Extracted main text
Language models increasingly settle real resource tradeoffs on behalf of principals yet their economic preferences remain unobserved. We demonstrate their generation rule is isomorphic to the random utility model of discrete choice. This allows internal logit scores to structurally identify preferences. Estimating risk attitudes across twelve models in a portfolio task reveals universal but heterogeneous risk aversion. Although models reject strictly dominated options, their elicited preferences fail invariance tests and violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives across varying experimental prompts. Finally, fine tuning establishes that a principal can explicitly engineer a target risk attitude.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | McFadden, Daniel (1972) Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior | 1.000 | 6 | 4 | 100% |
| 2 | Apesteguia, Jose and Miguel A Ballester (2018) Monotone stochastic choice models: The case of risk and time preferences | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Bruhin, Adrian, Helga Fehr-Duda, and Thomas Epper (2010) Risk and rationality: Uncovering heterogeneity in probability distortion | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Choi, Syngjoo, Raymond Fisman, Douglas Gale, and Shachar Kariv (2007) Consistency and heterogeneity of individual behavior under uncertainty | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Cohen, Alma and Liran Einav (2007) Estimating risk preferences from deductible choice | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Pezeshkpour, Pouya and Estevam Hruschka (2024) Large language models sensitivity to the order of options in multiple-choice questions | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Train, Kenneth E (2009) Discrete choice methods with simulation | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Varian, Hal R (1992) Microeconomic analysis, vol. 3 | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Afriat, Sydney N (1967) The construction of utility functions from expenditure data | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Akata, Elif, Lion Schulz, Julian Coda-Forno, Seong Joon Oh, Matthias… (2025) Playing Repeated Games with Large Language Models | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 74 scored citations.