arXiv:2604. 08525v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods like reinforcement learning.
By Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Shuyue Stella Li, Yulia Tsvetkov, Thomas L. Griffiths
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.
By Davood Wadi, Yu Ma
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
arXiv:2607. 25253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online recommendation has traditionally taken place after a user enters a platform, which determines the candidate pool and the ranking shown to the user.
By Deyao Hong, Kehan Zheng, Qian Li, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang, Hongning Wang