Millbrook Market: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Environment for Behavioral Fidelity
Millbrook Market live demo
Four interactive views in your browser — the market replayed, firms entering and leaving, 1,591 LLM decisions with their reasoning, and all 42 logged runs. No install, no server.
A synthetic consumer market built to find out when a simulated buyer can be trusted — and, more often, when it cannot.
Every phase writes down its question and its failure condition before it runs, and reports the answer either way. Most of the headline results are negative. Those are the ones worth reading.
TL;DR: We benchmarked LLMs and RL agents against real human scanner panel data (8,499 occasions). The headline result? Aggregate fidelity is cheap; individual closed-loop fidelity is not. LLMs drift significantly when their own choices drive their next observations. Policy complexity became valuable without becoming learnable.
See It in Action
No server required. Explore the simulation trajectories, agent reasoning, and market dynamics directly in your browser:
open viz/millbrook.html
(Note: Insert a 5-second GIF here showing the Market Entry/Exit tab or Agent Inspector running)
Four tabs, one file, zero dependencies:
- Market: A season replayed — buyers, stalls, who went where.
- Entry & Exit: Firms entering and leaving; week 11 shows the premium tier competed out.
- Agent Inspector: 1,591 LLM decisions with the model's own reasoning, beside what the rule said.
- Experiments: All 41 runs, their figures, and the commits behind them.
The Core Problem: Static vs. Interactive Evaluation
Most synthetic-consumer work evaluates models statically. Millbrook Market evaluates trajectories.
| Standard LLM Evaluation | Millbrook Market |
|---|
| Persona + Prompt → Response | Persona + State + Environment + Memory + Policy → Trajectory |
| Static — the world does not answer back | Interactive — sellers reprice, firms enter/exit, memory accumulates |
| One answer, no history | 22–110 weeks of choices that change later choices |
| Judged by whether it "sounds right" | Judged against a pre-registered empirical threshold |
A response can be graded by reading it. A trajectory can only be graded against a baseline (a real panel). A model can match human behaviour one step at a time and still drift once its own choices start driving its next observation.
| Agent Type | One-Step Fidelity | Closed-Loop Drift |
|---|
| Distilled Network | Matches the rule | 1.07× — barely compounds |
| LLM Agent | Half the rule's probability | 1.42× — the loop widens it |
| Simulator vs. Human Panel | Fits well | 1.09× — no drift with depth |
Key Empirical Insights
Insight 1: An LLM buyer is further from real humans than a marginal baseline
Tested on 3,289 real purchase occasions (Ecdat::Cracker scanner panel). Every arm got all four mechanism directions right, meaning sign agreement separates none of them.
| Arm | Distance to Humans | Log-Loss |
|---|
| Marginal brand shares | 0.1256 | 1.0696 |
| Conditional choice model | 0.0404 | 0.7739 |
| LLM Agent | 0.2448 | 1.8966 |
Insight 2: The Illusion of Aggregate Fidelity
A model that knows nothing about any individual household matches the aggregate choice distribution almost as well as one that knows every household (0.0035 vs. 0.0015) — while being twice as wrong per household. A synthetic-consumer product graded on distributional match can look excellent while carrying zero individual-level validity.
Insight 3: Identifying the Latent Class Bias
Fitting the LLM Agent against the ground-truth rule over 447 states yields: agent = −0.219 + 0.954 × rule.
Its comparative statics are right, but its intercept is broken. Adding that one number back recovers 71.6% of the collapse in a closed loop. What survives the correction is a class bias: +0.121 for high-income buyers, −0.063 for low-budget ones.
Insight 4: Bias is correctable — but only as a map, not a constant
The Agent's gap against humans changes sign depending on the context (e.g., −0.44 for cheap/promoted condiments vs. +0.20 for cheap/unpromoted dairy). A single constant correction is worth nothing (averages to −0.0017). Mapping the bias halves the held-out error (0.0888 → 0.0460).
(For full details on all 11 phases, including RL baseline failures and memory stability, see docs/phase_specifications.md)
System Architecture & RL Dynamics
The environment runs 100 buyers and up to 40 sellers. Everything each side does changes what the other side faces next week.
flowchart LR
B["BUYER (Agent)<br/>budget, taste, memory"]
S["SELLER (Environment)<br/>posted price, capital"]
L["SELLER LEARNS<br/>hill-climb, bandit, Q-network"]
E["MARKET DYNAMICS<br/>entry / exit based on capital"]
B -- "Action: Buy/Skip" --> S
S -- "Reward: Profit" --> L
L -- "State Update: New Price" --> B
S -- "Survival" --> E
E -- "Observation: Available Shelf" --> B
B -- "State Update: Loyalty" --> B
The Asymmetric Learning Loop
Sellers (Reinforcement Learners): Optimize for long-horizon return. Action space is discrete price multipliers. Policy is updated via Q-learning (γ = 0.9, ~10-week horizon), balancing exploration (ε-greedy, UCB1, LinUCB) with exploitation.
Buyers (Stateful Policies): Buyers have state and a policy but no reward function. They are hand-written rules, distilled networks, or LLMs. This distinction is load-bearing: we test whether a copied policy drifts under its own generated observations, not whether it maximizes a reward.
State Persistence: Loyalty (Guadagni & Little, 1983), capital, and the seller set carry across weeks. Only budget and inventory reset.
Scientific Integrity & Methodological Corrections
In evaluating AI systems, catching methodological artifacts is more important than claiming state-of-the-art. Here are four critical corrections made during development that are worth more than the results themselves:
-
A claim withdrawn: Phase 10 first reported human loyalty as "3.4× stronger than the simulator's". That compared an upper bound against a causal quantity. Withdrawn. The honest version: a memoryless model with household preferences predicts 97% of the observed repeat rate.
-
A measurement artifact caught: Human memory looked flat across eight weeks. The cause was a parity bug in the train/test split (odd lags averaged +0.016, even +0.032). Parity-free, it decays normally.
-
A win that was in-sample: The simulator arm first beat its baseline by 0.35 nats. It was reading answers it had been fitted to. Scored properly on held-out data: 0.005 nats, CI spanning zero.
-
Two bugs that cancelled: Phase 11 first reported no correction worked. One bug clipped only the corrected arms before scoring; the other keyed the map on context alone. They pointed opposite ways. Fixed, the map halves held-out error.
Reproducing the Environment
Every logged run records the commit it ran at. Runs marked -dirty were re-run clean and reproduced exactly.
# 1. Setup environment
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
# 2. Run test suite (358 tests)
python -m pytest -q
# 3. Execute a specific phase
python experiments/phase8/run_phase8.py
# 4. Rebuild the visualization
python tools/build_combined_viz.py
Repository Structure
src/market_sim/: Core engine, MDP config, bandits, RL implementations, LLM clients.experiments/: Runnable scripts per phase and per gate.docs/phase_specifications.md: The pre-registered spec — every gate, correction, and result.experiment_log.csv: Immutable outputs bound to commit hashes.
