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).
Ho Yiing Chen (Fri,) studied this question.