Who Should Know What? Empirical Information Design for Multi-Agent LLM Economies

Authors: Mete Erdogan , Mirac Suzgun , Aneesh Pappu , Guowei Xu , Batu El , Andrew A. Schoen , Furong Huang , John P. Dickerson , Mert Pilanci , James Zou

View a PDF of the paper titled Who Should Know What? Empirical Information Design for Multi-Agent LLM Economies, by Mete Erdogan and 9 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

Abstract: The performance of multi-agent LLM systems depends not only on the capabilities of the underlying models but also on information-sharing policies, which govern what information each agent observes and at what level of detail. But does providing AI agents with more detailed information always improve collective outcomes, or can transparency paradoxically degrade efficiency? To investigate this, we introduce empirical information design, an experimental framework that systematically compares disclosure policies across economic markets populated by LLM agents, while holding interaction rules and models fixed. We evaluate ten frontier LLMs in multi-resource trade, bilateral bargaining, and double auctions, using ground-truth utilities to decouple identified opportunities from realized outcomes. We find that finer information disclosure yields highly model-dependent results. In trade, revealing exact valuations rather than ordinal preference rankings reduces realized gains for GPT-6 Sol (from 98% to 91% of maximum) yet increases them for Claude Sonnet 5 (from 72% to 86%). In bargaining, exact information leads Grok 4.7 to produce less balanced agreements, whereas Claude Opus 5.5 divides gains symmetrically. In double auctions, full disclosure inflates price demands, triggering market breakdown and lowering welfare for Gemini 3.1 Pro (97% to 78%), Claude Opus 5.5 (94% to 64%), and Grok 4.7 (97% to 62%). Overall, these results suggest that model selection and information design must be co-optimized, as LLMs vary in how their strategic responses to information impact system objectives.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as:

arXiv:2611.07667 [cs.AI]

(or

arXiv:2611.07667v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07667

Focus to learn more

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Mete Erdogan [ view email ]

[v1]

Thu, 5 Nov 2026 08:51:37 UTC (648 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled Who Should Know What? Empirical Information Design for Multi-Agent LLM Economies, by Mete Erdogan and 9 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Additional Features

Audio Summary

Current browse context:

cs.AI

< prev

next >

new

recent

| 2026-11

Change to browse by:

cs

References & Citations

SciX

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

export BibTeX citation

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...

Data provided by:

Bookmark

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? )

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? )

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? )

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? )

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? )

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? )

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? )

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? )

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? )

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? )

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate ( What is Replicate? )

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? )

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? )

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? )

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? )

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? |

Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? )