Receiver Decides Agent-to-Agent Negotiations

Abstract: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.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.18424 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.18424v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.18424 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.