Collusion with Competitive Marginals: Price-Level Audits Are Blind by Construction

arXiv:2607.26385 · cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.CR · Submitted 2026-07-29 · Read on arXiv

Xin Xu, Chengrui Wu, Jiayu Lu, Kaizhen Tan, Siru Tao, Hanzhe Hong

cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-07-29

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures, includes technical appendix

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Regret — 24× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Copula — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 6× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Clustering — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AUC — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Loss Function — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fisher Information — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Q-learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Sources

• Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models
• On the Fragility of AI Agent Collusion
• Strategic Collusion of LLM Agents: Market Division in Multi-Commodity Competitions
• The Oracle's Fingerprint: Correlated AI Forecasting Errors and the Limits of Bias Transmission
• Time to Bribe: Measuring Block Construction Market
• Order Flow Exclusivity and Value Extraction Mechanisms: An Analysis of Ethereum Builder Centralization

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