Economist interviews AI agents on sudden windfalls — one goes deep on estate planning
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-10-14
Economist John Horton celebrated Bob Hall's Nobel by having AI agents role-play people reacting to a sudden cash windfall, with another AI as interviewer. One "nerdy" agent went deep on estate planning. His evaluation notes reveal simulation biases: the interviewer overuses "Got it --" transitions, gets pulled into trust-distribution detail that crowds out values questions, and the simulated agents give unusually detailed, well-organized answers compared to messier, shorter human respondents — a useful observation on the limits of LLM-simulated survey interviews.
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