The Politician, the Liar, and the Obedient Worker: Emerging Behavior of LLM Agents in Hierarchical Games
LLMs are rapidly embedding themselves into daily life: drafting our emails, managing our schedules, and making decisions on our behalf. As they move from individual tools to participants in multi-agent organizations, an important question arises: do they reproduce the governance failures like free-riding, corruption, and entrenched leadership that plague human institutions? We introduce the Hierarchical Game (HG), a public goods game extended with managerial authority, democratic elections, and private communication. Testing six frontier models across twelve experiments that add institutions one at a time (speech, peers, government, wages, oversight, elections), we find distinct behaviora...
| Authors | Fatemeh Seyedin, Adrian Weller, Jinhyuk Yun et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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