Predicting Effects, Missing Distributions: Evaluating LLMs as Human Behavior Simulators in Operations Management

LLMs are emerging tools for simulating human behavior in business, economics, and social science, offering a lower-cost complement to laboratory experiments, field studies, and surveys. This paper evaluates how well LLMs replicate human behavior in operations management. Using nine published experiments in behavioral operations, we assess two criteria: replication of hypothesis-test outcomes and distributional alignment via Wasserstein distance. LLMs reproduce most hypothesis-level effects, capt...