GPLab: A Generative Agent-Based Framework for Policy Simulation and Evaluation

Shuhan Zhang (), Zifan Peng () and Yinwang Ren ()

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2026, vol. 29, issue 1, 6

Abstract: Real-world social policy problems invariably involve complex dynamics with cross-domain, multi-factor interactions, posing significant challenges to ex-ante policy simulation and impact evaluation. Traditional statistical modeling approaches often fail to adequately capture individual behavioral heterogeneity and system-level dynamic propagation effects, while conventional agent-based modeling (ABM) relies heavily on hand-crafted behavioral rules, which constrains its adaptability to realistic decision-making processes and diverse policy contexts. To address this challenge, we propose GPLab (Generative Policy Laboratory), a general-purpose framework for policy simulation and evaluation that integrates generative Large Language Models (LLMs). By leveraging LLM-based agents with bounded rationality, GPLab simulates the cognition and behavior of social individuals, overcoming critical limitations of rule-based ABM in policy semantic understanding and scenario adaptation. Furthermore, its modular architecture explicitly represents interconnected social subsystems, enabling heterogeneous agents to interact dynamically across multiple domains and produce contextually grounded behavioral responses. In two representative policy evaluation cases, we successfully captured policy intensity-dependent effects, group behavioral heterogeneity, and emotional opinion evolution patterns. Formal consistency metrics further confirmed the stability of agent behavior and coherence of individual traits throughout simulations. Extended experiments demonstrated that our framework achieved high rationality scores across five policy scenarios, validating its cross-domain transferability. This study presents a scenario-agnostic policy simulation platform that significantly advances computational social science applications in public decision support. The code is available at: https://github.com/SmartLegislation/GPLab

Keywords: Large Language Models; Generative Agent-Based Modeling; Policy Simulation; Complex Social Systems; Computational Social Science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jasss.org/29/1/6/6.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jas:jasssj:2025-107-3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Renzini ().