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arXiv AI By Davood Wadi, Yu Ma

Shopping by algorithm: How agentic AI deploys human heuristics as a surrogate consumer

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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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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