What happens if you agents to run a town's economy?

This super interesting paper provides some insights:

They put 100 LLM agents in charge of a town economy for 26 simulated weeks, and they find that money stops moving.

The agents earn wages, run businesses and set prices on real Pokhara Lakeside geography, across 91 runs and 2.44M decisions.

A 12x tourist shock raises business revenue 4.62x. Wages move 1.03x, and only 0.3% of 3,981 menu items are ever repriced.

A cash transfer shows the same pattern. 96.7% of it is still unspent 311 steps later.

Here is the interesting part for anyone building agent simulations. Swapping the underlying LLM changed every outcome they measured. Deleting the agents' memory changed none of them detectably.

Results at the usual 1 to 2 week horizon also mislead. Wealth rankings look frozen at 2 weeks and only start to move by week 12.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11108

Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/but-how-would-ai-agents-run-a-towns-economy-2609.11108