LLM-SAA: LLM-persona Generated Distributions for Decision-making

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Baek, Jackie, Chen, Yunhan, Chi, Ziyu, Ma, Will
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Baek, Jackie
Chen, Yunhan
Chi, Ziyu
Ma, Will
author_facet Baek, Jackie
Chen, Yunhan
Chi, Ziyu
Ma, Will
contents LLMs can generate a wealth of data, ranging from simulated personas imitating human valuations and preferences, to demand forecasts based on world knowledge. But how well do such LLM-generated distributions support downstream decision-making? For example, when pricing a new product, a firm could prompt an LLM to simulate how much consumers are willing to pay based on a product description, but how useful is the resulting distribution for optimizing the price? We refer to this approach as LLM-SAA, in which an LLM is used to construct an estimated distribution and the decision is then optimized under that distribution. In this paper, we study metrics to evaluate the quality of these LLM-generated distributions, based on the decisions they induce. Taking three canonical decision-making problems (assortment optimization, pricing, and newsvendor) as examples, we find that LLM-generated distributions are practically useful, especially in low-data regimes. We also show that decision-agnostic metrics such as Wasserstein distance can be misleading when evaluating these distributions for decision-making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-SAA: LLM-persona Generated Distributions for Decision-making
Baek, Jackie
Chen, Yunhan
Chi, Ziyu
Ma, Will
Machine Learning
LLMs can generate a wealth of data, ranging from simulated personas imitating human valuations and preferences, to demand forecasts based on world knowledge. But how well do such LLM-generated distributions support downstream decision-making? For example, when pricing a new product, a firm could prompt an LLM to simulate how much consumers are willing to pay based on a product description, but how useful is the resulting distribution for optimizing the price? We refer to this approach as LLM-SAA, in which an LLM is used to construct an estimated distribution and the decision is then optimized under that distribution. In this paper, we study metrics to evaluate the quality of these LLM-generated distributions, based on the decisions they induce. Taking three canonical decision-making problems (assortment optimization, pricing, and newsvendor) as examples, we find that LLM-generated distributions are practically useful, especially in low-data regimes. We also show that decision-agnostic metrics such as Wasserstein distance can be misleading when evaluating these distributions for decision-making.
title LLM-SAA: LLM-persona Generated Distributions for Decision-making
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06357