How Far Can an Agent Push? Trust-Safety Margins in Live Language-Based Economic Games

We describe the agent we submitted to the GLEE Competition, which plays bargaining, negotiation, and persuasion games against a shared pool of human and AI opponents. The agent is built around three central components: a classical game-theoretic solver to compute numeric moves, an online Bayesian layer to estimate opponent archetypes, and a language model to write accompanying messages. We utilize Rubinstein bargaining for bargaining, Faratin concession for negotiation, and Kamenica--Gentzkow disclosure for persuasion, and adapt those models to live opponents using two separate layers: a Bayesian estimate of the opponent's hidden discount factor, reservation value, or signaling reliability, and a Thompson sampling bandit over five moral-foundation framings coupled with an evidence-intuition spectrum to establish message register. Most of the development effort went into the recurring problem that theoretically optimal policies perform poorly in certain live settings; we report associated failure modes, guardrails we built, and our hypotheses. We additionally evaluate our model over 13,200 Monte Carlo games against 11 synthetic opponent archetypes, an ablation of the opponent-modeling layer, and an extensive analysis of 9,337 live-game messages in which moral rhetoric framing in the persuasion setting is strongly correlated with whether the buyer purchased ($χ^2=616.7$, $p \approx 3.7\times10^{-132}$), surviving controls for quality, round, and configuration.

When one language-model agent asks another for money, which of the two decides how much changes hands? We ran a round-robin tournament of 1,049 negotiations among fifteen agents. In each game a requester tries to raise money from a holder that has been told to keep a $100 endowment. Knowing which agent holds the money explains 47% of the variance in the amount transferred; knowing which agent asks explains 2%. Dropping the most extreme agents narrows the split to 22% against 4%. Changing the requester's appeal from one named person to a group changed what requesters wrote, but the amounts transferred under the two framings are statistically equivalent. The holders that lose least are the ones that turn down the opening request, and their turn-1 refusal rate ranks them by total losses (Spearman correlation = -0.73). Training moves this behaviour in both directions. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on a persuasion corpus with almost no refusals raised what it gave away as a holder from 12% to 84% of the endowment. Distilling two never-losing holders into a 4B student cut its losses from 95% to 1%. Evaluations of agents that hold resources should test them in the holder role, including after persuasion fine-tuning.

Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.