Simulating Strategic Reasoning: Comparing the Ability of Single LLMs and Multi-Agent Systems to Replicate Human Behavior

When creating policies, plans, or designs for people, it is challenging for designers to foresee all of the ways in which people may reason and behave. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to simulate human reasoning. We extend this work by measuring LLMs’ ability to simulate strategic reasoning in the ultimatum game – a classic economics bargaining experiment. Experimental evidence shows human strategic reasoning is complex – people will often choose to “punish” other players to enforce social norms even at personal expense. We test if LLMs can replicate this behavior in simulation, comparing two structures: single LLMs and multi-agent systems. We compare their abilities to (1) simulate human-like reasoning in the ultimatum game, (2) simulate two player personalities, greedy and fair, and (3) create robust strategies that are logically complete and consistent with personality. Our evaluation shows that multi-agent systems are more accurate than single LLMs (88% vs. 50%) in simulating human reasoning and actions for personality pairs. Thus, there is potential to use LLMs to simulate human strategic reasoning to help decision and policy-makers perform preliminary explorations of how people behave in systems.