PACT: A Contract-Theoretic Framework for Pricing Agentic AI Services Powered by Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Ya-Ting, Zhu, Quanyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Ya-Ting
Zhu, Quanyan
author_facet Yang, Ya-Ting
Zhu, Quanyan
contents Agentic AI, often powered by large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly popular and adopted to support autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and task execution across various domains. While agentic AI holds great promise, its deployment as services for easy access raises critical challenges in pricing, due to high infrastructure and computation costs, multi-dimensional and task-dependent Quality of Service (QoS), and growing concerns around liability in high-stakes applications. In this work, we propose PACT, a Pricing framework for cloud-based Agentic AI services through a Contract-Theoretic approach, which models QoS along both objective (e.g., response time) and subjective (e.g., user satisfaction) dimensions. PACT accounts for computational, infrastructure, and potential liability costs for the service provider, while ensuring incentive compatibility and individual rationality for the user under information asymmetry. Through contract-based selection, users receive tailored service offerings aligned with their needs. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that PACT improves QoS alignment between users and providers and offers a scalable, liable approach to pricing agentic AI services in the future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21286
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PACT: A Contract-Theoretic Framework for Pricing Agentic AI Services Powered by Large Language Models
Yang, Ya-Ting
Zhu, Quanyan
Computer Science and Game Theory
Agentic AI, often powered by large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly popular and adopted to support autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and task execution across various domains. While agentic AI holds great promise, its deployment as services for easy access raises critical challenges in pricing, due to high infrastructure and computation costs, multi-dimensional and task-dependent Quality of Service (QoS), and growing concerns around liability in high-stakes applications. In this work, we propose PACT, a Pricing framework for cloud-based Agentic AI services through a Contract-Theoretic approach, which models QoS along both objective (e.g., response time) and subjective (e.g., user satisfaction) dimensions. PACT accounts for computational, infrastructure, and potential liability costs for the service provider, while ensuring incentive compatibility and individual rationality for the user under information asymmetry. Through contract-based selection, users receive tailored service offerings aligned with their needs. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that PACT improves QoS alignment between users and providers and offers a scalable, liable approach to pricing agentic AI services in the future.
title PACT: A Contract-Theoretic Framework for Pricing Agentic AI Services Powered by Large Language Models
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21286