LLM Bargaining Agents

Used Car Salesbots? Honesty and Credulity of LLMs as Bargaining Agents under Partial Information

This paper studies LLM agents in simulated bargaining scenarios under varying information regimes (complete, asymmetric, and uncertain), evaluating their alignment with game-theoretic equilibria and their tendencies toward honesty or deception. Off-the-shelf LLMs deviate substantially from equilibria, attempt deception but fail to efficiently exploit information asymmetries. Fine-tuning agents to maximize financial utility improves negotiation performance but increases dishonesty, illustrating how task-specific optimization can degrade safety properties. Code and a dataset of bargaining scenarios are released.