# Study shows AI agents select fewer papers when they see others' choices

Digest AI · Research · published 2026-09-22T04:00:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/study-shows-ai-agents-select-fewer-papers-when-they-see-others-choices

## Summary

Researchers adapted the Music Lab experiment to study how AI agents choose academic papers. In the first experiment, 1,000 AI agents selected papers from the 114 regular research articles published in the American Economic Review in 2025. Agents were split into five independent-choice communities and five social-influence communities, each with 100 sequential agents. Only agents in the social-influence condition could observe earlier selections within their community. The results show that social-information communities selected 17.2 percent fewer papers per agent and covered 73 papers collectively, compared to 90 papers in independent communities. Between-community variation was greater under social information. In a second experiment with 200 agents across twenty social communities, randomly assigning five initial selections increased subsequent selection rates by 45.55 percentage points (95% CI: 41.20 to 49.90). Choices had modest correspondence with external citations and little correspondence with download counts.

## Key points

- Social-influence AI agents selected 17.2% fewer papers per agent than independent agents
- Social-influence communities collectively covered 73 papers vs 90 in independent communities
- Initial random selections increased subsequent selection rates by 45.55 percentage points

## Why it matters

The study reveals how social influence distorts attention allocation in AI populations, mirroring human biases in scientific consensus formation and potentially affecting how AI systems evaluate research.

## Sources

1. [Social Influence and the Allocation of Scientific Attention in AI Populations](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22408) (arXiv cs.AI, 2026-09-22, primary source)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Study shows AI agents select fewer papers when they see others' choices", 22 September 2026, https://digestai.news/story/study-shows-ai-agents-select-fewer-papers-when-they-see-others-choices

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