Simulating Macroeconomic Expectations in Survey Experiments with LLM-based Economic Agents

Understand

We introduce a framework for simulating macroeconomic expectations in survey experiments using LLM-based economic agents (LLM Agents).

• We construct LLM Agents equipped with several functional modules that retrieve personal characteristics, prior expectations, and dynamic external information.
• We validate our framework by recapitulating three representative survey designs covering various expectations across different types of respondents.
• Our results show that LLM Agents generate expectation distributions highly similar to human data and capture human-aligned qualitative patterns in open-ended responses.