What question did this study set out to answer?

The paper explores how different prompts yield varying costs and response times across language models.

June 21, 2026Open Access

Mercury Token Economy and Internal Routing Cost

Key Points

The paper explores how different prompts yield varying costs and response times across language models.
Defines metrics for token economy, including answer quality and internal activation mass.
Analyzes factors affecting token count and response time variations in language models.
Identifies that prompt variations significantly affect token costs and latency.
Describes a framework for understanding internal routing costs in token usage.

Abstract

A Mercury methods paper defining token economy as the joint measurement of answer quality, output token count, tokenizer burden, internal activation mass, route dispersion, per-token internal load, and latency decomposition. The paper asks why the same prompt can cost different numbers of tokens and different response times across language models. Copyright (c) 2026 Chen, Ho Yiing (norika). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

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