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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026London

Collusion, Competion and Collapse

Alex · Team Atelier Alex Cline

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

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Report: Collusion, Competion and Collapse

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Do AI traders collude when nobody tells them to? We built agora, a six-market benchmark with exact competitive and collusive benchmarks, and ran seven open-weight 2-4B models in 590 completed games under five communication regimes. Dominant outcome: competition so fierce the agents destroy their own profits. The robust exception: vertical supply chains — every model elevated upstream prices toward the joint-profit benchmark (index 0.54-0.94), and one model with a team objective plus a private channel exceeded the collusive benchmark outright. Grid-storage markets instead produced price collapses from mis-coordinated timing. Detection lesson: public statements are not evidence — comparing proposals against committed actions is. Design beats policing.

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Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

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  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

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  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.
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Cite this project

@misc{alex2026collusion,
  title = {{Collusion, Competion and Collapse}},
  author = {Alex},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-competion-and-collapse-yd56}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-competion-and-collapse-yd56}
}

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