Papers for

consumer data analysts

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Llms show inconsistent preference patterns across models and domains

Evaluating LLM-Generated Preference Distributions

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as probabilistic generators for simulation, synthetic data generation, and decision support in settings where real-world data are unavailable. Yet, the structure and reliability of the distributions they produce remain understudied. Here, we systematically analyze LLM-generated distributions of preferences for air travel, restaurants, and consumer products. Encouragingly, all models considered in our analysis exhibit self-coherence, with the most probable outcomes stabilizing rapidly under repeated sampling. At the same time, we observe substantial discordance across both model families and scales, with little consensus even among their most probable outcomes. These patterns hold across nine open-weight models, three choice domains, and show robustness under temperature changes, greedy decoding, and perturbations of prompt and ordering. Our findings indicate that outcomes are influenced more by the choice of model than by the wording of the prompt, challenging the common assumption that sufficiently capable LLMs produce similar preference distributions when used as stand-ins for survey respondents.

Thu 1 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Many people use large language models (LLMs) to simulate choices when real survey data isn't available. This study finds that while each model gives consistent answers when asked repeatedly, different models often disagree about what preferences are most likely. The differences are larger between models than they are from how questions are asked. This means that the choice of which model to use greatly affects the simulated preferences you get.
Open → 2610.01000v1