这篇论文告诉你，用AI做经济学研究时，喂它人类直觉比纯指令好使，但别指望它比刚入行的博士生强多少。
该研究以EC 2025论文中一个关于公共物品稳定菜单的开放问题为测试平台，评估不同AI研究工作流的效果。实验发现：(1)在提示中加入人类直觉能提升LLM的“品味”；(2)多轮交互工作流在鼓励“大胆步骤”时更有效。与一名一年级博士生比较，LLM在解决该问题上的效果略逊一筹。研究尚未公开博士生参与前的原始手稿对比细节。
Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress
Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.