@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-behavioral,
    title = "Behavioral Consistency Validation for {LLM} Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation",
    author = "Li, Zeping  and
      Wan, Guancheng  and
      Chen, Keyang  and
      Chen, Yu  and
      Zhao, Yiwen  and
      Torr, Philip  and
      Ye, Guangnan  and
      Yin, Zhenfei  and
      Chai, Hongfeng",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2006/",
    pages = "40356--40370",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Recent works have increasingly applied Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents in financial stock market simulations to test if micro-level behaviors aggregate into macro-level phenomena. However, a crucial question arises: Do LLM agents' behaviors align with real market participants? This alignment is key to the validity of simulation results. To explore this, we select a financial stock market scenario to test behavioral consistency. Investors are typically classified as fundamental or technical traders, but most simulations fix strategies at initialization, failing to reflect real-world trading dynamics. In this work, we assess whether agents' strategy switching aligns with financial theory, providing a framework for this evaluation. We operationalize four behavioral-finance drivers{---}loss aversion, herding, wealth differentiation, and price misalignment{---}as personality traits set via prompting and stored long-term. In year-long simulations, agents process daily price-volume data, trade under a designated style, and reassess their strategy every 10 trading days. We introduce four alignment metrics and use Mann{--}Whitney U tests to compare agents' style-switching behavior with financial theory. Our results show that recent LLMs' switching behavior is only partially consistent with behavioral-finance theories, highlighting the need for further refinement in aligning agent behavior with financial theory."
}