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The Reasoning Tax: Token Economics of LLM Reasoning Across Task Types and Deployment Contexts

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

Accuracy-only benchmarking of reasoning-capable large language models misses a central deployment question: when do extended thinking tokens earn their cost? We introduce the Token Economy Score (TES), a marginal benchmarking metric that measures the accuracy gain of a reasoning model over a non-reasoning baseline, normalized by the generated-token multiplier. We define paired and approximated TES variants for model families with reasoning toggles and frontier models without direct non-reasoning counterparts. We then conduct an empirical benchmarking analysis across 151 model-benchmark evaluat

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