Evaluating and Aligning Human Economic Risk Preferences in LLMs

Jiaxin Liu, Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang, Kar Yan Tam


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making scenarios that involve risk assessment, yet their alignment with human economic rationality remains unclear. In this study, we investigate whether LLMs exhibit risk preferences consistent with human expectations across different personas. Specifically, we propose an evaluation metric called Risk Disparity Score (RDS) and assess whether LLM-generated responses reflect appropriate levels of risk aversion or risk-seeking behavior based on individual’s persona. Our results reveal that while LLMs make reasonable decisions in simplified, personalized risk contexts, their performance declines in more complex economic decision-making tasks. To address this, we test whether current state-of-art alignment methods such as Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) and In Context Learning(ICL) can enhance LLM adherence to persona-specific risk preferences. We find DPO can improve the economic rationality of LLMs in loss-related parameters, offering a step toward more human-aligned AI decision-making.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.917
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
18185–18199
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.917/
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Cite (ACL):
Jiaxin Liu, Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang, and Kar Yan Tam. 2025. Evaluating and Aligning Human Economic Risk Preferences in LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18185–18199, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating and Aligning Human Economic Risk Preferences in LLMs (Liu et al., EMNLP 2025)
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