Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07023v1
- Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:25:10 GMT
- Title: Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation
- Authors: Zeping Li, Guancheng Wan, Keyang Chen, Yu Chen, Yiwen Zhao, Philip Torr, Guangnan Ye, Zhenfei Yin, Hongfeng Chai,
- Abstract summary: We use a financial stock market scenario to test whether agents' strategy switching aligns with financial theory.<n>We operationalize four behavioral-finance drivers-loss aversion, herding, wealth differentiation, and price misalignment-as personality traits set via prompting and stored long-term.<n>Our results show that recent LLMs' switching behavior is only partially consistent with behavioral-finance theories.
- Score: 37.95724732592611
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- 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.
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