When Should Forecasting Agents Reason? Behavioral Stress Tests for Reliability Routing
Forecasting agents increasingly combine language-model reasoning, retrieval, ensembling, and calibration, but it remains unclear when each behavior should be trusted.
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Forecasting agents increasingly combine language-model reasoning, retrieval, ensembling, and calibration, but it remains unclear when each behavior should be trusted. We study this question on ForecastBench-style binary forecasting tasks, treating the choice to retrieve, reason, defer to a market prior, or use a historical analog as an observable agent behavior rather than a hidden implementation detail. Our central finding is that mechanism choice is source-dependent: structured analogs dominate for some data-generating processes, while market/crowd-style and conservative baselines are better for others. We introduce ReliabilityRoute, a structural intervention that steers forecasting-agent behavior using reliability features such as historical coverage, market-prior availability, source-prior sharpness, evidence strength, evidence disagreement, and horizon. A fixed 2024-fitted rule closely matches a hand taxonomy without hard-coded source-name decisions, while a walk-forward self-adjusting rule refits thresholds from previously resolved vintages and obtains the best mean Brier score among our deterministic systems across 16 later LLM vintages.
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