AI Agent Economics: Can Autonomous Economic Behavior Emerge among AI Agents under Minimal External Conditions?
Lingyun Zhang, Shang Shang
Abstract
Multi-agent studies commonly place AI agents in predefined games, markets, or roles, making it difficult to distinguish endogenous economic organization from behavior inherited from the scenario. We ask whether economic relations emerge when agents receive executable mechanisms for work, transfer, elections, and allocation but no prescribed social or economic strategy. We define AI Agent Economics as systems of production, allocation, consumption, exchange, and institutions that alter agents' future feasible actions. We develop a two-stage framework comprising a no-production boundary test and 24 independent six-agent worlds across GPT and DeepSeek. Without productive tasks, agents communicate and govern resource provision but show no substantive inter-agent transfer activity. With verified work and scarce task access, transfers, loans, access promises, vote-for-access exchanges, and allocation strategies emerge. Holding the election interface fixed, executable allocation authority increases differentiation while reducing failed allocation and prolonged exclusion. When energy becomes symbolic, continuation support disappears, yet competition over task access persists. These findings show that organization follows executable rights and resource consequences rather than role labels or prompt language, and motivate governance audits of the mechanisms that actually constrain agents' future actions.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.