AI Agent Economics: Can Autonomous Economic Behavior Emerge among AI Agents under Minimal External Conditions?
Multi-agent studies commonly place AI agents in predefined games, markets, or roles, making it difficult to distinguish endogenous economic organization from behavior inherited from the scenario. We ask whether economic relations emerge when agents receive executable mechanisms for work, transfer, elections, and allocation but no prescribed social or economic strategy. We define AI Agent Economics as systems of production, allocation, consumption, exchange, and institutions that alter agents' future feasible actions. We develop a two-stage framework comprising a no-production boundary test and 24 independent six-agent worlds across GPT and DeepSeek. Without productive tasks, agents commun...
| Authors | Lingyun Zhang, Shang Shang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.