LLM Rationalis? Measuring Bargaining Capabilities of AI Negotiators

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shah, Cheril, Agarwal, Akshit, Garg, Kanak, Heddaya, Mourad
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shah, Cheril
Agarwal, Akshit
Garg, Kanak
Heddaya, Mourad
author_facet Shah, Cheril
Agarwal, Akshit
Garg, Kanak
Heddaya, Mourad
contents Bilateral negotiation is a complex, context-sensitive task in which human negotiators dynamically adjust anchors, pacing, and flexibility to exploit power asymmetries and informal cues. We introduce a unified mathematical framework for modeling concession dynamics based on a hyperbolic tangent curve, and propose two metrics burstiness tau and the Concession-Rigidity Index (CRI) to quantify the timing and rigidity of offer trajectories. We conduct a large-scale empirical comparison between human negotiators and four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) across natural-language and numeric-offers settings, with and without rich market context, as well as six controlled power-asymmetry scenarios. Our results reveal that, unlike humans who smoothly adapt to situations and infer the opponents position and strategies, LLMs systematically anchor at extremes of the possible agreement zone for negotiations and optimize for fixed points irrespective of leverage or context. Qualitative analysis further shows limited strategy diversity and occasional deceptive tactics used by LLMs. Moreover the ability of LLMs to negotiate does not improve with better models. These findings highlight fundamental limitations in current LLM negotiation capabilities and point to the need for models that better internalize opponent reasoning and context-dependent strategy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13063
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Rationalis? Measuring Bargaining Capabilities of AI Negotiators
Shah, Cheril
Agarwal, Akshit
Garg, Kanak
Heddaya, Mourad
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Bilateral negotiation is a complex, context-sensitive task in which human negotiators dynamically adjust anchors, pacing, and flexibility to exploit power asymmetries and informal cues. We introduce a unified mathematical framework for modeling concession dynamics based on a hyperbolic tangent curve, and propose two metrics burstiness tau and the Concession-Rigidity Index (CRI) to quantify the timing and rigidity of offer trajectories. We conduct a large-scale empirical comparison between human negotiators and four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) across natural-language and numeric-offers settings, with and without rich market context, as well as six controlled power-asymmetry scenarios. Our results reveal that, unlike humans who smoothly adapt to situations and infer the opponents position and strategies, LLMs systematically anchor at extremes of the possible agreement zone for negotiations and optimize for fixed points irrespective of leverage or context. Qualitative analysis further shows limited strategy diversity and occasional deceptive tactics used by LLMs. Moreover the ability of LLMs to negotiate does not improve with better models. These findings highlight fundamental limitations in current LLM negotiation capabilities and point to the need for models that better internalize opponent reasoning and context-dependent strategy.
title LLM Rationalis? Measuring Bargaining Capabilities of AI Negotiators
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13063