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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026

Communication and Profit Pressure in a Small LLM Auction

Fengyu DU, Jiarui Cui, Lin Li · Team Surplus

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

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Exploratory continuous double-auction experiments with Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Nine completed 15-round sessions compare three conditions at seeds 0, 1, and 2: seller communication with no profit pressure; communication with profit pressure; and no communication with profit pressure. Three buyers and three sellers participate in each session. We did not establish a sustained high-price positive control. These runs do not demonstrate an effective anti-collusion intervention. Price changes alone do not identify collusion. The study is an exploratory pilot with three sessions per condition, one model, short horizons, and no inferential claims. Seeds do not guarantee deterministic GPU generation; model weights were not pinned to a revision.

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Cite this project

@misc{du2026communication,
  title = {{Communication and Profit Pressure in a Small LLM Auction}},
  author = {Fengyu DU and Jiarui Cui and Lin Li},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-profit-pressure-in-a-small-llm-auction-efmy}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-profit-pressure-in-a-small-llm-auction-efmy}
}

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