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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026

One Honest Bot Is Enough: Breaking Up Price Collusion Between Learning Pricing Bots

Emediong Etuk · Team Obito

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

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Report: One Honest Bot Is Enough: Breaking Up Price Collusion Between Learning Pricing Bots

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Pricing bots that learn by trial and error can quietly learn to keep prices high together, like a cartel. I tested four simple fixes, one at a time, in a standard market with two such bots (50 runs each).

Swapping just one of the two bots for an honest “no-regret” bot cut collusion by 91%, from 0.83 to 0.08 (0 = fair competition, 1 = full cartel). Forcing random prices helped only partly, adding a third seller helped a little, and hiding rival prices made collusion worse.

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Cite this project

@misc{etuk2026one,
  title = {{One Honest Bot Is Enough: Breaking Up Price Collusion Between Learning Pricing Bots}},
  author = {Emediong Etuk},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/one-honest-bot-is-enough-breaking-up-price-collusion-between-learning-pricing-bots-l2ri}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/one-honest-bot-is-enough-breaking-up-price-collusion-between-learning-pricing-bots-l2ri}
}

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