GLEE: A Unified Framework and Benchmark for Language-based Economic
  Environments
Authors: name: Eilam Shapira; name: Omer Madmon; name: Itamar Reinman; name: Samuel Joseph Amouyal; name: Roi Reichart; name: Moshe Tennenholtz
Published: 2024-10-07 17:55:35

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in economic and
strategic interactions, where communication via natural language is often
prevalent. This raises key questions: Do LLMs behave rationally? Can they mimic
human behavior? Do they tend to reach an efficient and fair outcome? What is
the role of natural language in the strategic interaction? How do
characteristics of the economic environment influence these dynamics? These
questions become crucial concerning the economic and societal implications of
integrating LLM-based agents into real-world data-driven systems, such as
online retail platforms and recommender systems. While the ML community has
been exploring the potential of LLMs in such multi-agent setups, varying
assumptions, design choices and evaluation criteria across studies make it
difficult to draw robust and meaningful conclusions. To address this, we
introduce a benchmark for standardizing research on two-player, sequential,
language-based games. Inspired by the economic literature, we define three base
families of games with consistent parameterization, degrees of freedom and
economic measures to evaluate agents' performance (self-gain), as well as the
game outcome (efficiency and fairness). We develop an open-source framework for
interaction simulation and analysis, and utilize it to collect a dataset of LLM
vs. LLM interactions across numerous game configurations and an additional
dataset of human vs. LLM interactions. Through extensive experimentation, we
demonstrate how our framework and dataset can be used to: (i) compare the
behavior of LLM-based agents to human players in various economic contexts;
(ii) evaluate agents in both individual and collective performance measures;
and (iii) quantify the effect of the economic characteristics of the
environments on the behavior of agents.