AIAgent studiesStory 07
A simulated AI town stopped spending
What changedResearchers ran 100 memory-equipped agents in a closed simulated Pokhara economy for as long as 26 weeks. Tourist demand raised business revenue, but wages and prices barely moved and cash transfers were mostly hoarded. The released corpus makes the failure inspectable, while the artificial economy remains a simulation rather than evidence about people or autonomous businesses.
The useful part
Why it matters
Long runs can expose frozen behavior that a convincing short agent-society demo conceals, making duration an important part of evaluation.
Worth doing
What to do next
Use the released traces to test whether alternative memory, incentives or transaction rules reproduce or remove the observed freeze.
Keep in mind
Good to know
This is a closed simulation on mapped geography and should not be read as a model of human economic policy.
Evidence