From Preference to Reciprocity: Decentralized Matching with Empirically Grounded LLM-agent Based Modeling
2609.34679

Authors

Shipei Zeng,Pin Gao,Yan Hu,Zhongxiang Dai,Wangxuan Fan

Abstract

Bipartite matching is a fundamental problem in game theory and market design. Classical approaches such as Gale--Shapley assume complete preferences and centralized computation, whereas many real-world matching processes are decentralized, asynchronous, and shaped by sequential interaction under limited information.

We propose a dynamic bipartite matching framework that combines large language model (LLM) agents with contextual bandits. In a simulated Chinese marriage market, economically grounded LLM agents evaluate locally encountered candidates, while agent-specific Logistic-UCB models learn reciprocal acceptance from realized proposal outcomes.

The mechanism therefore separates two decisions---whom do I like? and who is likely to like me back?---without requiring ex ante market-wide preference rankings. We first validate LLM-induced mate preferences against the empirical conditional-logit reference across multiple LLM backbones.

In the $50\times50$ matching experiment, Bandit-UCB achieves the highest mean mutual welfare (56.01 versus 54.87 for Gale--Shapley), a smaller gender rank gap than the classical baselines, and the fewest blocking pairs among the LLM-ABM policies. Learned acceptance models show economically interpretable gender-differentiated associations, while counterfactual setups reveal no systematic unilateral advantage from prior search knowledge.

Overall, these results support the advantages of decentralized matching with LLM-based behavioral modeling and online learning under incomplete information for economic simulation and computational social science research.

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