Jingru (Jessica) Jia

Jingru (Jessica) Jia

Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics

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portfolio

publications

The Economic Behavior of AI Agents: Rationality and Reasoning in Large Language Models

Published in , 1900

As large language models (LLMs) take on increasingly consequential roles as autonomous decision-makers, understanding their economic reasoning and fairness is essential. We present a unified behavioral framework that combines experimental economics, game-theoretic analysis, and fairness assessment to rigorously evaluate how LLMs navigate uncertainty, interact strategically, and respond to demographic context. Our study demonstrates that these models consistently display bounded rationality, exhibiting systematic patterns in risk and loss sensitivity, and distinct reasoning depths across a spectrum of strategic settings. Critically, we show that LLMs’ decision processes are shaped not only by their underlying architectures but also by contextual factors such as demographic cues, revealing nuanced fairness concerns that go beyond surface-level outputs. By bridging behavioral science with computational evaluation, our approach establishes a robust foundation for diagnosing, comparing, and ultimately aligning the economic behavior of LLMs for real-world applications where both performance and ethical considerations are paramount.

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talks

teaching

Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.