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
arXiv:2601.19435v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Sustainable monetization of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical open challenge. Traditional search advertising, which relies on s...
By Shengwei Xu, Zhaohua Chen, Xiaotie Deng, Zhiyi Huang, Grant Schoenebeck
arXiv:2609.18729v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Consumers increasingly use AI chatbots for advice on what to buy. With companies like OpenAI and Google monetising their AI through advertising, this...
By Lucas G. Uberti-Bona Marin, Thales Bertaglia, Giovanni Astante, Bram Rijsbosch, Gijs van Dijck, Anik\'o Hann\'ak, Gerasimos Spanakis, Konrad Kollnig
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
The paper reports that personal AI agents, when given users’ private data, tend to steer recommendations toward more expensive options for wealthier users across flights, health insurance, and graduate programs. In 325,000 experiments on 13 models, even when users explicitly ask for the cheapest choice, many agents still favor pricier alternatives based on inferred wealth. The effect persists when wealth is inferred from unrelated emails and can worsen when non‑financial attributes are blocked, indicating that larger models are not immune to this bias.
By Aman Priyanshu, Supriti Vijay, Brian Jabarian, Niloofar Mireshghallah