Scaffolding the Strategist: Architecture-Dependent Reasoning Interventions in Hotelling Spatial Markets

Abstract

arXiv:2607.09743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether structured reasoning interventions improve the strategic economic reasoning of large language models, and whether their effects depend on model architecture. Using Hotelling's linear city model as a diagnostic vehicle, we evaluate GPT-4.1-mini (a standard instruction-following model) and GPT-5-mini (a reasoning-optimized model) under five conditions - an unscaffolded baseline and four reasoning interventions - across eight qu