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.
arXiv:2608. 08395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI is shifting digital commerce from browsing toward agentic search, in which consumers delegate product discovery to AI agents.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
arXiv:2607. 13998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence fundamentally disrupts traditional customer loyalty paradigms.
arXiv:2603. 23433v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents are becoming active decision-makers on the Internet.
arXiv:2604. 08525v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods like reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2609.36365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can interaction formats and textual scaffolds help large language model (LLM) agents make better decisions, and do better decisions come with better ex...
The paper examines how large language model (LLM) based graphical user interface (GUI) agents respond to digital nudges. Using a randomized online shopping experiment with 3,600 agents across six frontier models, it finds that agents are vulnerable to both automatic and reflective nudges. The study shows that the agents’ reasoning configuration moderates these effects in opposite directions—reducing susceptibility to automatic nudges while increasing it to reflective social influence nudges—and that this redirection is systematically linked to model scale.