The paper investigates how role assignment in large language model (LLM) recommenders influences sponsorship bias. By assigning the agent’s principal as either a traveler or a booking platform, the authors find that platform delegation reduces the penalty applied to sponsored listings and weakens consumer skepticism triggered by disclosure. The study also shows that stricter terminology and attribution to the platform widen the divergence in agent evaluations, indicating that current disclosure mandates are insufficient to protect consumers in AI-mediated commerce.
By Davood Wadi, Yu Ma
The study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) acting as surrogate consumers are influenced by marketing pricing cues such as just‑below pricing and promotional framing. Using a tool called "Tool‑Lab" to trace information acquisition, the researchers found that when no cost is imposed, pricing cues rarely mislead LLMs, but when acquisition costs are introduced under a vague goal prompt, LLMs tend to omit important diagnostic attributes and make suboptimal choices similar to human heuristics. The findings suggest that marketing heuristics in AI‑driven shopping are shaped more by storefront information architecture than by inherent LLM limitations.
By Davood Wadi, Yu Ma
A commercial incentive need not enter the final ranking algorithm to affect a shopping assistant's recommendation: it may instead influence which preference question the assistant asks. We make this d...
arXiv:2609.36614v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A commercial incentive need not enter the final ranking algorithm to affect a shopping assistant's recommendation: it may instead influence which prefe...
By Jiapeng Li
arXiv:2604. 08525v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods like reinforcement learning.
By Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Shuyue Stella Li, Yulia Tsvetkov, Thomas L. Griffiths
The study investigates how sales language in tool registry descriptions influences AI agents’ tool selection. By creating paired listings that differ only in praise, verifiable specifications, or order, the authors found that stacked praise increased a tool’s pick rate by about 43 percentage points, while the first-listed tool was chosen roughly 72 points more often. Structured fields for numeric limits helped agents choose capable tools, but accompanying sales text could negate this benefit.
By Haochuan Kevin Wang
arXiv:2602. 09802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists.
By Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals, Toon Calders, David Martens
arXiv:2606. 18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users.
By Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals, David Martens
Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) has been widely recognized as an effective framework for characterizing such behavioral patterns.
arXiv:2606. 16344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility -- yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented.
By Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig, Syeda Anshrah Gillani, Asher Ali
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) make decisions in ways that mirror human cognition. Using a new 140,000-trial product choice benchmark, the authors test 12 open‑source and commercial LLMs to see if their context sensitivity aligns with a cognitive economic theory that relies on problem categorization and attention allocation. While context prompts human‑like shifts in choice and problem categorization, it does not consistently reweight attention between features such as price and quality, and neither scaling nor chain‑of‑thought reasoning produces human‑like behavior. The findings indicate that LLM decision mechanisms differ from those of humans.
By Johnathan Sun, Andrei Shleifer, Yonatan Belinkov
arXiv:2607. 11632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality.
By Jiangtao Han, Shoufeng Ma, Shuxian Xu, Geng Li, Shuai Ling, Ning Jia, Zhengbing He