EDEN: Optimal Economic Mechanism Design via LLM-Driven Evolutionary Search

Mechanism design asks how to write the rules of a game so that self-interested players produce a desirable outcome. Classical approaches derive these rules analytically, which limits them to settings simple enough to solve by hand.

EDEN treats mechanism design as a search problem: a population of candidate mechanisms, expressed as code, is evolved under selection pressure from simulated economic agents, with a language model serving as the mutation operator.