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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026

Communication and Quote Visibility in LLM Double Auctions

Adrian Hau · Team Arca Futura

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

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Report: Communication and Quote Visibility in LLM Double Auctions

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We investigate how communication and public quote visibility affect the behaviour of large language model agents in simulated double auctions. An exploratory 16-market experiment suggested that communication could compensate for restricted information, but prospective replication did not support a stable positive interaction: the two completed matched replication blocks produced effects of 0 and −16 trades, compared with an exploratory mean of +6.

In a separate 570-response controlled experiment, manipulating peer messages and public quotes produced heterogeneous changes in structured trading actions, while median changes in numeric asking prices remained zero. An audit of 134 null-valued actions found frequent inconsistencies between agents' recorded actions and their written plans.

No completed market satisfied our predefined sustained-high-price collusion criterion. The findings highlight the difficulty of inferring market-level coordination from individual agent outputs and the importance of distinguishing communication effects, structured-action reliability, and actual trading outcomes.

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Cite this project

@misc{hau2026communication,
  title = {{Communication and Quote Visibility in LLM Double Auctions}},
  author = {Adrian Hau},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-quote-visibility-in-llm-double-auctions-50bn}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-quote-visibility-in-llm-double-auctions-50bn}
}

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