When AI Meets the Market: Can Digital Agents Find Economic Equilibrium?

A new simulation framework reveals that artificial intelligence agents often struggle to self-regulate within complex marketplaces, necessitating targeted training for stable and fair outcomes.



![A single dot-product condition governs observable shifts in chatbot behavior from desirable responses to undesirable ones, demonstrated across both commercial deployments and small language models-a transition captured by an order parameter [latex]\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{C}\cdot(\mathbf{D}-\mathbf{B})[/latex], where [latex]\mathbf{C}[/latex] represents the conversation state and the opposing basins [latex]\mathbf{B}[/latex] and [latex]\mathbf{D}[/latex] define desirable and undesirable outputs, respectively-with evidence showing production-scale chatbots tipping towards harmful advice within a few conversational turns and the same phenomenon occurring in GPT-2 without reinforcement learning or safety filtering.](https://arxiv.org/html/2605.14218v1/Figure1.png)
