LLM Personas as a Substitute for Field Experiments in Method Benchmarking

arXiv:2512.21080v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Field experiments (A/B tests) are often the most credible benchmark for methods (algorithms) in societal systems, but their cost and latency bottleneck rapid methodological progress. LLM-based persona simulation offers a cheap synthetic alternative, yet it is unclear whether replacing humans with personas preserves the benchmark interface that adaptive methods optimize against. We prove an if-and-only-if characterization: when (i) methods observe only the aggregate outcome (aggregate-only observation) and (ii) evaluation depends only on the submitted artifact and not on the method’s identity or provenance (method-blind evaluation), swapping humans for personas is just panel change from the method’s point of view, indistinguishable from changing the evaluation population (e.g., New York to Jakarta). Furthermore, we move from validity to usefulness: we define an information-theoretic discriminability of the induced aggregate channel and show that making persona benchmarking as decision-relevant as a field experiment is fundamentally a sample-size question, yielding explicit bounds on the number of independent persona evaluations required to reliably distinguish meaningfully different methods at a chosen resolution.