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
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Competitive Market Behavior of LLMs

The study investigates how large language models (LLMs) perform in a double auction market, a common economic mechanism. By replacing human participants with LLM agents, the authors find that markets with LLMs converge more slowly or not at all, leading to less efficient resource allocations. Analysis of trading decisions reveals significant variation across model families and roles, and a lexical study of Chain-of-Thought traces links trade execution to a shift from strategic thinking to urgency.

By Pawel Struski, Jakub Swistak, Inez Okulska, Przemyslaw Biecek