AI Agent Economics: Can Autonomous Economic Behavior Emerge among AI Agents under Minimal External Conditions?

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] AI Agent Economics: Can Autonomous Economic Behavior Emerge among AI Agents under Minimal External Conditions? Lingyun Zhang, Shang Shang 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. Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ACM classes: I.2.11; J.4 Cite as: arXiv:2608.03076 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2608.03076v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.03076 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shang Shang [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 03:40:08 UTC (506 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)