arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

PrefBench: Evaluating Zero-Shot LLM Agents in Hidden-Preference Personalized Pricing Negotiations

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Computer Science > Computer Science and Game Theory

arXiv:2605.22855 (cs)
[Submitted on 19 May 2026]

Title:PrefBench: Evaluating Zero-Shot LLM Agents in Hidden-Preference Personalized Pricing Negotiations

Authors:Yingjie Lei
View a PDF of the paper titled PrefBench: Evaluating Zero-Shot LLM Agents in Hidden-Preference Personalized Pricing Negotiations, by Yingjie Lei
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Abstract:Personalized pricing negotiations are a challenging testbed for LLM agents because successful interaction does not guarantee profitable decision making. A seller may produce valid actions and close many deals while still pricing poorly when buyer willingness to pay and bargaining traits remain hidden. This paper presents PrefBench, a simulator-based benchmark for hidden-preference personalized pricing negotiations. Each episode pairs a simulated buyer with a fixed vehicle-customization bundle; the seller observes public persona descriptors, bundle information, and negotiation history, while latent buyer variables govern valuation, patience, counter-offer behavior, and walkaway decisions. PrefBench evaluates this setting through an LLM-facing state-summary protocol that constrains agents to return strict JSON actions under a fixed hidden-information boundary. We evaluate zero-shot LLM sellers against heuristic references over 7,500 episodes. The tested LLMs follow the protocol reliably and achieve deal rates above 0.99, but their seller-profit outcomes remain weak: the best LLM average profit is only slightly above the random baseline and far below a simple concession heuristic under the same episode stream. These results show that structured action compliance and agreement-seeking behavior can coexist with weak profit-sensitive bargaining. PrefBench provides a controlled benchmark for evaluating pricing-agent behavior under hidden buyer preferences.
Comments: 24 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Code is available at this https URL
Subjects: Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.22855 [cs.GT]
  (or arXiv:2605.22855v1 [cs.GT] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.22855
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Yingjie Lei [view email]
[v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 04:10:05 UTC (153 KB)
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