SocialFiVis: A Visual Analytics Sandbox for LLM-Grounded Multi-Agent Simulation in Social Finance

The emergence of social finance (SocialFi) transforms online communities into complex socio-economic systems. Within these spaces, collective decisions shape a “digital commons” characterized by social capital (e.g., community trust) and financial health (e.g., market liquidity). Governing such hybrid ecosystems is challenging because real-world interventions are costly and irreversible. While counterfactual simulation is essential for exploring alternative governance strategies, existing approaches fail to capture the complex, non-linear interplay between governance rules, individual behaviors, and emergent economic outcomes. To systematically unpack this complexity, we operationalize the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as our theoretical foundation, synthesizing prior literature with insights from formative expert interviews. Built on this framework, we present SocialFiVis, an IAD-embedded visual analytics sandbox. It introduces a robust model to quantify the dual-track digital commons, coupled with a two-phase simulation engine. This engine combines LLM-derived personas with a mechanism-guided Perception–Reasoning–Action (PRA) runtime to simulate heterogeneous, context-aware agents empirically grounded in the retained messaging cohort. A hierarchical multi-view interface with interpretable reasoning pathways enables stakeholders to explore counterfactual policies and trace system-level outcomes back to individual behavioral rationales. We validate SocialFiVis through case studies, expert interviews, and a user study. Results demonstrate that SocialFiVis supports fine-grained behavioral attribution and helps explain emergent phenomena such as the structural decoupling of social capital and the resilience of messaging members under localized governance shocks.