时间：2026年4月22日（周三）13:30-15:00
地点：理科大楼A1114会议室
题目：Large Language Models as Synthetic Respondents for Economic Preferences: A Global Audit
主讲人：陈发动 浙江大学管理学院教授
主持人：龚冰琳 经济与管理学院教授
内容简介：Large-scale surveys are central to the study of economic preferences but are costly and slow to conduct. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise the question of whether synthetic respondents can substitute for human participants. We address this question by running a virtual version of the Global Preference Survey (GPS), a large cross-national instrument that elicits six experimentally validated economic preferences in nationally representative samples from 74 countries and 42 languages. Using a one-to-one, persona-based prompting protocol that embeds respondents’ demographics, location, local language, and country-specific incentives, eight leading LLMs predict human economic preferences for approximately 70,000 individuals in the original GPS. We find systematic but modest alignment with human data at the individual level, with LLMs capturing many of the demographic gradients in gender, age, and cognitive ability. However, alignment deteriorates with aggregation. LLMs only partially recover cultural heterogeneity and show limited correspondence with country-level preference structure. Probing sources of misalignment, we show that country-level performance covaries with economic development and digital infrastructure, but not with population size or the number of internet users. These results indicate that while LLMs can mirror certain forms of individual- and group-level heterogeneity in economic preferences, they are not reliable substitutes for representative surveys, macro-level inference, or policy evaluation. LLM-based synthetic respondents may nonetheless aid early-stage hypothesis generation, study-design diagnostics, provided their use is accompanied by careful validation and attention to developmental and cultural biases.
主讲人简介：陈发动，浙江大学管理学院教授，国家优秀青年科学基金获得者。曾获浙江省哲学社会科学优秀成果二等奖、中国运筹学会行为运作管理分会优秀青年学者研究奖、浙江大学青年学者十大学术进展等。入选“仲英青年学者”，“之江青年学者”。主要从事行为决策、行为运营管理、行为与实验经济学、人类行为与机器智能等领域的教学与科研工作。主持国家自然科学基金青年基金、面上项目、优秀青年科学基金项目等多项科研项目。相关研究发表于《Nature》、《Nature Communications》、《Management Science》、《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》等期刊。