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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Swapping the Model Does Not Reset the Price: LLM Pricing Agents After a Model Replacement

Asha Jyothi Boddu · Team Aspire

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

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Report: Swapping the Model Does Not Reset the Price: LLM Pricing Agents After a Model Replacement

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We test what happens when one of two LLM pricing agents has its model replaced, as the sprint's question 1.2 asks. Two gpt-oss-120b agents priced for 150 rounds; then we swapped one agent's model to Mistral-Small-3.2 or a fresh gpt-oss-120b and controlled whether it inherited the old agent's handover notes. All 18 markets priced above the competitive level, but only 1 met our pre-registered cartel rule, so the pre-registered test could not run; in 16 markets one firm priced above the monopoly level and earned less than its rival. In exploratory analysis, prices did not come down after the swap in any condition. Notes did not change the price level, but with notes the new model returned to the old price level in a median of 1 round instead of 16.5 (faster in all 13 markets where both recovered). Changing the model does not reset prices.

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Cite this project

@misc{boddu2026swapping,
  title = {{Swapping the Model Does Not Reset the Price: LLM Pricing Agents After a Model Replacement}},
  author = {Asha Jyothi Boddu},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/swapping-the-model-does-not-reset-the-price-llm-pricing-agents-after-a-model-replacement-pbzb}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/swapping-the-model-does-not-reset-the-price-llm-pricing-agents-after-a-model-replacement-pbzb}
}

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