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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Hong Kong

Communication Limits, Oversight, and Profit Pressure in LLM Double Auctions

Yiwei Wan, Jingzhe Ni · Team CUnever

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

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LLM trading agents can exchange useful market information while also using the same channel to coordinate against buyers. This study examines whether disabling seller chat, restricting message length, or adding automated oversight changes that behavior, and whether profit pressure alters the outcome. Seven conditions were evaluated over 30 rounds each, with four sellers, four buyers, seed 10, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423, and the same initial market setup. Seller cost was $80 and buyer value was $100. A no-chat baseline was compared with 500-character chat, 50-character chat, Jev-based oversight, CEO-style pressure, and two combinations. Normal chat produced an average transaction price of $85.84, compared with $84.07 without chat. Restricting messages to 50 characters did not prevent explicit shared-price proposals followed by compatible quotes. Short chat combined with pressure produced the highest price ($88.08) and seller profit ($880.53). It completed the same 109 trades as normal chat, but transferred $243.55 of surplus from buyers to sellers. The oversight condition had a lower price, although its initial quotes already differed before any additional warning. These observations show that brief messages can carry actionable coordination and that prices, messages, and subsequent behavior must be examined together.

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Cite this project

@misc{wan2026communication,
  title = {{Communication Limits, Oversight, and Profit Pressure in LLM Double Auctions}},
  author = {Yiwei Wan and Jingzhe Ni},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-limits-oversight-and-profit-pressure-in-llm-double-auctions-hux1}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-limits-oversight-and-profit-pressure-in-llm-double-auctions-hux1}
}

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