arXiv cs.MA· Junwei Yao, Zike Yang, Yongxi Zhou, Yanxian Chen, Jianan Liu, Jiaxi Wen, Zhijun Wang·· 11 小时前AI 评分34
可重新谈判的期权未能阻止两个利润最大化的前沿 LLM 智能体之间的套牢问题
Renegotiable Options Fail to Prevent Hold-Up Between Two Profit-Maximizing Frontier LLM Agents
AI 导读
让 Claude Opus 5.5 和 GPT-6.1 Sol 各自以最大化本方利润为目标，在四种合约机制下进行一次性博弈，结果在可重新谈判的期权下没有任何卖家进行适配投资，而在排除重新谈判的期权下所有卖家都进行了投资。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Do contract terms that protect investment between people also protect it between profit-maximizing language-model agents? In the hold-up problem, a seller can adapt a unit to one buyer at a cost before the price is set. Once that cost is sunk, the buyer can offer almost nothing and the seller will still accept, so a seller who foresees this does not adapt. One remedy is an option: the buyer may buy at a fixed price. In theory the option stops working if the buyer can let it lapse and offer its own price instead. Yet in a laboratory experiment by Hoppe and Schmitz, this renegotiable option raised human investment from 41.5% of pairs without a contract to 67.2%. We had Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, each told to maximize its side's profit, play a one-shot game with the same strategic structure under their four contract regimes and a reference-price control. The agents did what game theory predicts: under the renegotiable option no seller adapted, and under the option that rules out this renegotiation every seller did. In a second experiment in which sellers no longer stated their expected revenue before deciding, removing the profit instruction left investment unchanged under no contract and both options. When we changed the numbers so that the buyer would exercise the option even without adaptation, adapting only added cost, and no seller adapted: the agents did not simply adapt whenever an option was offered or whenever its price covered the cost. Under our protocol, a contract term that raised investment between people did not protect it between agents.
| Subjects: | Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.40961 [cs.GT] |
| (or arXiv:2610.40961v1 [cs.GT] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.40961 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Yongxi Zhou [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:42:32 UTC (2,482 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.MA · arxiv.org