Michiel Hutschemaekers graduated on the 28th of August 2024, as the first master’s student at IBEX. His thesis — “Reproducing the “Flip a Coin or Vote” experiment with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o” – is a simulation study of the suitability of LLMs as participants in economic and behavioral experiments.
The thesis reproduces an experiment with multiple choice stages and strategic interactions using AI agents (LLMs) as participants. The results show the strengths and weaknesses of LLM agents as experimental subjects, with implications for behavioral research and Institutional testing using LLM agents. The thesis was awarded with an excellent grade; 8.5. Michiel’s research shows that LLMs can be used as economic agents in experiments that are a little more complicated than the typical prisoner’s dilemma.