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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026India

Theseus Cartel: What Successor Pricing Agents Inherit After Complete Replacement

Subramanyam Sahoo · Team Subramanyam

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

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Report: Theseus Cartel: What Successor Pricing Agents Inherit After Complete Replacement

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We tested whether pricing behavior persists after every pricing model in a two-seller market is replaced, and whether history retention or replacement wording changes what the successors do. Four open-weight language models played a pricing game calibrated to twelve retail product contexts, producing 576 founder histories (half neutral, half instructed to collude) and 7,488 matched continuations in which both founders were replaced. We also corrected a price-scale error in the starter benchmark. The result is null: none of the six primary comparisons passed the significance threshold after multiple-test adjustment, and the intervals allow large effects in either direction. Only 112 of 288 neutral and 47 of 288 instructed founders reached the high-profit criterion, so formation was the bottleneck. Retained-history terminal profits fell below Nash, very high prices often lost profit, and the rebound probe cannot tell punishment from simple copying. The study shows neither cartel inheritance nor that replacement works as a remedy; what it delivers is a reproducible test design and a corrected benchmark.

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Cite this project

@misc{sahoo2026theseus,
  title = {{Theseus Cartel: What Successor Pricing Agents Inherit After Complete Replacement}},
  author = {Subramanyam Sahoo},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/theseus-cartel-what-successor-pricing-agents-inherit-after-complete-replacement-xm4f}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/theseus-cartel-what-successor-pricing-agents-inherit-after-complete-replacement-xm4f}
}

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