Formal Mechanisms for Market Stability in Self-Interested Agent Societies: A Marketplace Simulation Study
arXiv:2607.08652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-interested agents, left unconstrained, tend toward defection in repeated social dilemmas, causing cooperative gains from trade to collapse. This paper investigates what formal mechanisms, layered on top of unrestricted communication, are sufficient for a society of such agents to maintain market stability, and how resilient those mechanisms are to adversarial attack. We instantiate the research question as a multi-agent marketplace simulation where 18 LLM agents (DeepSeek-V3) with complementary production specialties must trade within a cons
The proliferation of advanced LLMs capable of self-interested behavior necessitates immediate research into mechanisms for stable multi-agent systems, particularly as AI agents move beyond controlled environments.
Understanding how to enable stable, cooperative marketplaces among self-interested AI agents is critical for the safe and effective deployment of autonomous systems in complex economic and social domains.
This research provides foundational insights into designing formal mechanisms that can prevent collapse in multi-agent economic systems, moving beyond simple communication to ensure market stability.
- · AI agent developers
- · Multi-agent system platforms
- · Digital economy operators
- · Regulatory bodies studying AI
- · Unconstrained, 'wild' AI agent systems
- · Systems relying solely on 'goodwill' for agent cooperation
Demonstrated mechanisms for market stability among self-interested AI agents using LLMs.
Accelerated development of robust, trust-minimized frameworks for autonomous AI agent economies.
The emergence of fully decentralized, self-regulating AI-driven marketplaces and associated legal/ethical challenges.
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Read at arXiv cs.AI