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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Can Pricing Agents Collude Without Words?

Yuvraj Pandey · Team Ace

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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As decision models such as TypeSafe’s Jev bring AI directly into software workflows, an important question emerges: can agents coordinate harmful behavior without exchanging messages? We investigated this through a pricing experiment using Clef-Flash and Qwen3.5-9B, both restricted to choosing prices without generating explanations or plans. Across 96 simulated two-firm markets and 64 follow-up runs with controlled changes to rival pricing, we collected 17,240 records of individual firms’ pricing decisions. We compared agents facing responsive rivals, restricted observations, and prerecorded rival prices. We found no evidence of sustained collusion under the tested conditions: average live prices remained close to the competitive benchmark. However, both models shifted their next choices sharply toward higher prices when shown a supplied high-price history, and Qwen reduced prices modestly after being undercut. The heatmaps reveal another pattern: as interaction progressed, both models concentrated more probability around competitive prices. These findings distinguish following a pricing pattern from creating and sustaining a cartel.

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Cite this project

@misc{pandey2026pricing,
  title = {{Can Pricing Agents Collude Without Words?}},
  author = {Yuvraj Pandey},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/can-pricing-agents-collude-without-words-p4xv}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/can-pricing-agents-collude-without-words-p4xv}
}

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