The Shadow Price of Reasoning: Economic Perspective on Optimal Budget Allocation for LLMs

In three linesarXiv paper proposing CLEAR, an optimal budget allocation method for LLM inference grounded in economic theory. Using a shifted-surge utility function and global shadow pricing, CLEAR performs rational abandonment and reallocates resources from insolvent to solvable queries. Results: 3x improvement in global accuracy vs uniform allocation under resource scarcity.

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