Probing Outcome-Level Resemblance and Mechanism-Level Alignment in LLM Risk Decisions: Evidence from the St. Petersburg Game
LLMs can appear cautious in risk decision-making tasks, yet cautious-looking outputs do not necessarily indicate alignment with human decision-making mechanisms. We investigate this distinction using the St. Petersburg game as a controlled testbed, a classical paradox in which the expected payoff is infinite, yet humans typically report low, finite willingness to pay. We evaluate 28 LLMs with a structured prompt suite that includes the original game; controlled decision variants that perturb truncation, repeated play, numeric endowment, and occupational identity; a human-perspective prompt that asks models to reason as human decision makers; and paired comparisons between base models and ...
| Authors | Chensong Huang, Changyu Chen, Chenwei Lin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 June 2026 |
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