The Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: When LLM Agents Allocate Social Welfare

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission24823 Authors

Keywords: LLM Agents; Fairness; Social Consideration

TL;DR: we introduce the Social Welfare Function (SWF) Benchmark, a dynamic simulation environment where an LLM acts as a sovereign allocator, highlight the risks of deploying current LLMs as societal decision-makers.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce the {\bf Social Welfare Function (SWF) Benchmark}, a dynamic simulation environment where an LLM acts as a sovereign allocator, distributing tasks to a heterogeneous community of recipients. The benchmark is designed to create a persistent trade-off between maximizing collective efficiency (measured by Return on Investment) and ensuring distributive fairness (measured by the Gini coefficient). We evaluate 20 state-of-the-art LLMs and present the first leaderboard for social welfare allocation. Our findings reveal three key insights: (i) A model's general conversational ability, as measured by popular leaderboards, is a poor predictor of its allocation skill. (ii) Most LLMs exhibit a strong default utilitarian orientation, prioritizing group productivity at the expense of severe inequality. (iii) Allocation strategies are highly vulnerable, easily perturbed by output-length constraints and social-influence framing. These results highlight the risks of deploying current LLMs as societal decision-makers and underscore the need for specialized benchmarks and targeted alignment for AI governance.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 24823