When Guardrails Look Effective: Construct Validity Failures in LLM Agent Commerce Evaluation

The paper investigates how marketplace guardrails affect welfare in language‑model agent simulations of hotel transactions. It finds that initial reports of large welfare gains disappear when controlling for offer schemas and buyer choice, and that guardrails mainly redistribute rather than increase welfare unless sellers are explicitly forced to produce inefficient bundles. The authors propose a construct‑validity framework to flag invalid or inconclusive policy claims before they are reported.

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.

• llms
• agents
• safety