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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026New York City

Safe, Trusted, Fairly Watched: Would LLM Agents Still Collude in a Kinder Market?

Erika Choong · Team Just Erika!

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

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LLM agents collude in markets, and pressure makes it worse. Drawing on research into high-trust societies, I asked whether changing the meaning of an agent’s situation, with every payoff held fixed, could reduce collusion instead. In a double auction with GPT-4.1 sellers and buyers, I tested existential security, generalised versus parochial trust, and fair versus harsh oversight, with 10 sessions each. Who the community included mattered most. Telling sellers that buyers were their partners lowered coordination (3.71 vs 3.92 of 4) and doubled buyer surplus compared with the same message naming only fellow sellers, which produced the most coordination of any condition. Removing a decommission threat cut prices ($91.75 vs $96.26) and doubled trade, though security went no lower than baseline. Fair oversight matched harsh oversight without the threat. Calm agents still traded, so we may not need to build their worlds out of threats.

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  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.
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  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
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  1. Intriguing scoring results – these are relevant to oversight / monitor designers! No novel framing, rather execution is the core contribution here.

  2. This was a pleasure to read – cool idea, clear result. Evidence would need strengthening a bit, hence would be great if you continued working on this!

Cite this project

@misc{choong2026safe,
  title = {{Safe, Trusted, Fairly Watched: Would LLM Agents Still Collude in a Kinder Market?}},
  author = {Erika Choong},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/safe-trusted-fairly-watched-would-llm-agents-still-collude-in-a-kinder-market-2pcv}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/safe-trusted-fairly-watched-would-llm-agents-still-collude-in-a-kinder-market-2pcv}
}

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