arXiv Machine Learning

Price of Anarchy of First-Price Auctions in Agentic Markets

arXiv AI
4d ago

Decentralized LLM Workflows via Sequential Auctions

The paper introduces a scalable framework that uses decentralized markets of self‑interested agents to solve multi‑step tasks. It shows that when agents compete through sequential auctions, perfect competition fails because clones drive profits to zero, while no competition also collapses value extraction. By allowing heterogeneous agents to shade bids strategically, the authors demonstrate that imperfect competition can sustain profitable margins while still achieving high task success rates at low costs, evaluating four bidding algorithms across three auction protocols.

By Ian Gemp, Shubhendu Trivedi, Adam Fisch, Fantine Huot, Michael Kaisers, Mirella Lapata, William W. Cohen, Alekh Agarwal, Kate Larson, Jacob Eisenstein
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Oblivious Learning and Collusive Pricing

The paper investigates whether pricing algorithms on multi‑seller platforms should incorporate competitors’ prices when learning demand. It compares two strategies: informed sellers that use competitor prices in their learning models, and oblivious sellers that ignore them. The study finds that oblivious sellers must explore prices more aggressively to offset missing competitor information; when all sellers are oblivious, prices eventually converge to the competitive outcome, but insufficient exploration can create many pseudo‑equilibria. In mixed markets, informed sellers earn more, and the unique Nash equilibrium is a fully informed market where prices efficiently converge to the competitive outcome, showing that oblivious modeling does not reliably produce collusion.

By Yuhang Wu, Assaf Zeevi