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AI buying agents concentrate demand on 2-3 products and ignore the rest (arxiv.org)
2 points by dmpyatyi 219 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Tested AI shopping agents by having them choose products in randomized trials, checking how their picks change with listing order, tags, and wording. Agents clustered on a few items, flipped choices when models updated or listings moved, and sellers gained share by tweaking descriptions.

Abstract · What Is Your AI Agent Buying? Evaluation, Biases, Model Dependence, & Emerging Implications for Agentic E-Commerce

Online marketplaces will be transformed by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. Rather than humans browsing and clicking, AI agents can parse webpages or leverage APIs to view, evaluate and choose products. We investigate the behavior of AI agents using ACES, a provider-agnostic framework for auditing agent decision-making. We reveal that agents can exhibit choice homogeneity, often concentrating demand on a few ``modal'' products while ignoring others entirely. Yet, these preferences are unstable: model updates can drastically reshuffle market shares. Furthermore, randomized trials show that while agents have improved over time on simple tasks with a clearly identified best choice, they exhibit strong position biases -- varying across providers and model versions, and persisting even in text-only "headless" interfaces -- undermining any universal notion of a ``top'' rank. Agents also consistently penalize sponsored tags while rewarding platform endorsements, and sensitivities to price, ratings, and reviews vary sharply across models. Finally, we demonstrate that sellers can respond: a seller-side agent making simple, query-conditional description tweaks can drive significant gains in market share. These findings reveal that agentic markets are volatile and fundamentally different from human-centric commerce, highlighting the need for continuous auditing and raising questions for platform design, seller strategy and regulation.

Amine Allouah, Omar Besbes, Josué D Figueroa, Yash Kanoria, Akshit Kumar
arXiv:2508.02630 · cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC, cs.MA, econ.GN · submitted Aug 4, 2025 · updated Dec 17, 2025
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Last Augusts paper about AI-Agents buying stuff online.

It's seems interesting in the context of OpenClaw and rising popularity of agents itself.

Most interesting topics from article:

- Agents ignore most products and pile onto 1-2 "modal" picks

- Sponsored tags hurt selection. Agents penalize ads.

- Position bias flips direction between model versions

- Simple description rewrites moved market share +8–15 p.p.

Last one is the most interesting, i'm thinking that AI-custdevs era is near.

Be prepared - agenprobe.sarm.solutions