EconGym: A Scalable AI Testbed with Diverse Economic Tasks

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful tool for economic research, enabling large-scale simulation and policy optimization. However, applying AI effectively requires simulation platforms for scalable training and evaluation—yet existing environments remain limited to simplified, narrowly scoped tasks, falling short of capturing complex economic challenges such as demographic shifts, multi-government coordination, and large-scale agent interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EconGym, a scalable and modular testbed that connects diverse economic tasks with AI algorithms. Grounded in rigorous economic modeling, EconGym implements 11 heterogeneous role types (e. g. , households, firms, banks, governments), their interaction mechanisms, and agent models with well-defined observations, actions, and rewards. Users can flexibly compose economic roles with diverse agent algorithms to simulate rich multi-agent trajectories across 25+ economic tasks for AI-driven policy learning and analysis. Experiments show that EconGym supports diverse and cross-domain tasks—such as coordinating fiscal, pension, and monetary policies—and enables benchmarking across AI, economic methods, and hybrids. Results indicate that richer task composition and algorithm diversity expand the policy space, while AI agents guided by classical economic methods perform best in complex settings. EconGym also scales to 100k agents with high realism and efficiency.

Authors

• Qirui Mi
• Qipeng Yang
• Zijun Fan
• Wentian Fan
• Heyang Ma
• Chengdong Ma Peking University
• Siyu Xia Advanced Ocean Institute, Southeast University, Nantong, China School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
• Bo An Nanyang Technological University Skywork AI
• Jun Wang
• Haifeng Zhang Research Institute of Tsinghua University, Pearl River Delta, Guangzhou, China

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