Scaffolding the Strategist: Architecture-Dependent Reasoning Interventions in Hotelling Spatial Markets
We investigate whether structured reasoning interventions improve the strategic economic reasoning of large language models, and whether their effects depend on model architecture. Using Hotelling's linear city model as a diagnostic vehicle, we evaluate GPT-4.1-mini (a standard instruction-following model) and GPT-5-mini (a reasoning-optimized model) under five conditions - an unscaffolded baseline and four reasoning interventions - across eight questions spanning deductive and abductive reasoning, three prompt framings, and three repetitions per condition, yielding 720 individually judged responses. We find a statistically significant crossover interaction between scaffolding type and mo...
| Authors | Pratyush Singh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 July 2026 |
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