Using AI to Categorize Strategic Situations and Study Human Behavior

Title: Using AI to Categorize Strategic Situations and Study Human Behavior | Academic Seminar
Speaker: Dr. Matthew O. Jackson The William D. Eberle | Professor of Economics Stanford University
Date: Tuesday, Nov 11, 2025
Time: 11:30 AM
Room: Paul Martin Centre (Laurier) & Hybrid

SUMMARY

By varying prompts to a large language model, we can elicit the full range of human behaviors in a variety of different scenarios in classic economic games. By analyzing which prompts elicit which behaviors, we can categorize and compare different strategic situations, which can also help provide insight into what different economic scenarios induce people to think about. We discuss how this provides a step towards a non-standard method of inferring (deciphering) the motivations behind human behaviors. We also show how this deciphering process can be used to categorize differences in the behavioral tendencies of different populations.

BIOGRAPHY

Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford Universityand an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford. Jackson's research
interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books
`The Human Network' and `Social and Economic Networks'. He also teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Econometric Society, the Game Theory Society, and an Economic Theory Fellow. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the von Neumann Award from Rajk Laszlo College, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance, and Management.