Join us for a CSSI lunch seminar with --
Speaker: Yair Zick, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
Date and Time: Friday November 7, 2025, 12pm – 1:30pm
Location: Lederle Graduate Research Center (LGRC), Room A112
Is your LLM a capitalist?
Abstract: Humans and AI make decisions based on their innate/encoded social values. However, the sheer complexity of human/AI decision making processes makes it exceedingly difficult to meaningfully elicit their social values. We propose an algorithmic elicitation framework that approximates an unknown welfare concept. More specifically, we devise methods that ask agents to respond to a sequence of (carefully designed) social dilemmas. We empirically evaluate our methods on a variety of large-language models. Our analysis indicates that some LLMs exhibit utilitarian behavior, whereas others are more egalitarian.
Bio: Yair Zick is an assistant professor at the College of Information Systems and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at the NUS School of Computing. He obtained his PhD (mathematics) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2014, and a B.Sc (mathematics, "Amirim" honors program) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include computational market design, computational social choice, algorithmic game theory and algorithmic transparency. He is the recipient of the 2011 AAMAS Best Student Paper award, the 2014 Victor Lesser IFAAMAS Distinguished Dissertation award, the 2016 ACM EC Best Paper award, the 2017 Singapore NRF Fellowship and the 2021 IJCAI Early Career Spotlight Award.
