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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026New York Hub

Can Transparency In Pricing Policy Facilitate Collusion Among LLM Agents?

Himanshu Raj

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

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Report: Can Transparency In Pricing Policy Facilitate Collusion Among LLM Agents?

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In this work we apply some ideas borrowed from open source game theory to the double auction setup of Agrawal et al. (2025). The question that is being addressed in this report is: Can pricing agents coordinate and come up with collusive behaviour simply by observing their competitors' executable pricing policies, without exchanging messages in natural language? We investigate this possibility in AI agents mediated double auction and compare the effects of policy transparency among agents against explicit natural-language communication. The study is closely related to the work of Agrawal et al. (2025), where it was found that allowing LLM sellers to exchange messages increases collusive behaviour in double auctions. Our experiments show that allowing policy transparency also leads to supra-competitive prices, with an effect comparable to communication via natural language. The trends seen in our results are robust across a range of model temperatures and two model choices, and the effect is smaller when buyers are strategic LLM agents.

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Cite this project

@misc{raj2026transparency,
  title = {{Can Transparency In Pricing Policy Facilitate Collusion Among LLM Agents?}},
  author = {Himanshu Raj},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/can-transparency-in-pricing-policy-facilitate-collusion-among-llm-agents-710h}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/can-transparency-in-pricing-policy-facilitate-collusion-among-llm-agents-710h}
}

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