MERIT Feedback Elicits Better Bargaining in LLM Negotiators

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10467v2
• Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:41:02 GMT
• Title: MERIT Feedback Elicits Better Bargaining in LLM Negotiators
• Authors: Jihwan Oh, Murad Aghazada, Yooju Shin, Se-Young Yun, Taehyeon Kim,
• Abstract summary: AgoraBench is a new benchmark spanning nine challenging settings.<n>This is operationalized via agent utility, negotiation power, and acquisition ratio that implicitly measure how well the negotiation aligns with human preference.<n>Our mechanism substantially improves negotiation performance, yielding deeper strategic behavior and stronger opponent awareness.
• Score: 38.1466669265123
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Bargaining is often regarded as a logical arena rather than an art or a matter of intuition, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to navigate it due to limited strategic depth and difficulty adapting to complex human factors. Current benchmarks rarely capture this limitation. To bridge this gap, we present an utility feedback centric framework. Our contributions are: (i) AgoraBench, a new benchmark spanning nine challenging settings (e.g., deception, monopoly) that supports diverse strategy modeling; (ii) human-aligned, economically grounded metrics derived from utility theory. This is operationalized via agent utility, negotiation power, and acquisition ratio that implicitly measure how well the negotiation aligns with human preference and (iii) a human preference grounded dataset with learning pipeline that strengthens LLMs' bargaining ability through both prompting and finetuning. Empirical results indicate that baseline LLM strategies often diverge from human preferences, while our mechanism substantially improves negotiation performance, yielding deeper strategic behavior and stronger opponent awareness.

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