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The Innate Economic Preferences of Language Models

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  • Joy Buchanan
  • Joshua Foster

Abstract

Language models increasingly settle real resource tradeoffs on behalf of principals yet their economic preferences remain unobserved. We demonstrate their generation rule is isomorphic to the random utility model of discrete choice. This allows internal logit scores to structurally identify preferences. Estimating risk attitudes across twelve models in a portfolio task reveals universal but heterogeneous risk aversion. Although models reject strictly dominated options, their elicited preferences fail invariance tests and violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives across varying experimental prompts. Finally, fine tuning establishes that a principal can explicitly engineer a target risk attitude.

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  • Joy Buchanan & Joshua Foster, 2026. "The Innate Economic Preferences of Language Models," Papers 2607.26288, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2607.26288
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    File URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26288
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