Toward Explanatory Equilibrium: Verifiable Reasoning as a Coordination Mechanism under Asymmetric Information
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917400227610624 |
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| author | Bańka, Feliks Chudziak, Jarosław A. |
| author_facet | Bańka, Feliks Chudziak, Jarosław A. |
| contents | LLM-based agents increasingly coordinate decisions in multi-agent systems, often attaching natural-language reasoning to actions. However, reasoning is neither free nor automatically reliable: it incurs computational cost and, without verification, may degenerate into persuasive cheap talk. We introduce Explanatory Equilibrium as a design principle for explanation-aware multi-agent systems and study a regime in which agents exchange structured reasoning artifacts-auditable claims paired with concise text-while receivers apply bounded verification through probabilistic audits under explicit resource constraints. We contribute (i) a minimal mechanism-level exchange-audit model linking audit intensity, misreporting incentives, and reasoning costs, and (ii) empirical evidence from a finance-inspired LLM setting involving a Trader and a Risk Manager. In ambiguous, borderline proposals, auditable artifacts prevent the cost of silence driven by conservative validation under asymmetric information: without structured claims, approval and welfare collapse. By contrast, structured reasoning unlocks coordination while maintaining consistently low bad-approval rates across audit intensities, audit budgets, and incentive regimes. Our results suggest that scalable, safety-preserving coordination in LLM-based multi-agent systems depends not only on audit strength, but more fundamentally on disciplined externalization of reasoning into partially verifiable artifacts. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09917 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Toward Explanatory Equilibrium: Verifiable Reasoning as a Coordination Mechanism under Asymmetric Information Bańka, Feliks Chudziak, Jarosław A. Multiagent Systems Computer Science and Game Theory LLM-based agents increasingly coordinate decisions in multi-agent systems, often attaching natural-language reasoning to actions. However, reasoning is neither free nor automatically reliable: it incurs computational cost and, without verification, may degenerate into persuasive cheap talk. We introduce Explanatory Equilibrium as a design principle for explanation-aware multi-agent systems and study a regime in which agents exchange structured reasoning artifacts-auditable claims paired with concise text-while receivers apply bounded verification through probabilistic audits under explicit resource constraints. We contribute (i) a minimal mechanism-level exchange-audit model linking audit intensity, misreporting incentives, and reasoning costs, and (ii) empirical evidence from a finance-inspired LLM setting involving a Trader and a Risk Manager. In ambiguous, borderline proposals, auditable artifacts prevent the cost of silence driven by conservative validation under asymmetric information: without structured claims, approval and welfare collapse. By contrast, structured reasoning unlocks coordination while maintaining consistently low bad-approval rates across audit intensities, audit budgets, and incentive regimes. Our results suggest that scalable, safety-preserving coordination in LLM-based multi-agent systems depends not only on audit strength, but more fundamentally on disciplined externalization of reasoning into partially verifiable artifacts. |
| title | Toward Explanatory Equilibrium: Verifiable Reasoning as a Coordination Mechanism under Asymmetric Information |
| topic | Multiagent Systems Computer Science and Game Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09917 |