arXiv:2607.26385cs.GTcs.AI2026-07

算法共谋可伪装成竞争性价格,现有审计方法根本无法发现。

Collusion with Competitive Marginals: Price-Level Audits Are Blind by Construction

  • 通过联合分布耦合竞价行为,使单个代理的报价符合竞争规律。
  • 真实语言模型中存在显著残余相关性(+0.053),远超跨模型水平。
  • 监管重点应从检测转向身份归并,可提升市场集中度指标247%以上。

针对算法共谋的实证研究通常只问:价格是否高于竞争水平?我们证明,即使利润可观,答案也可能是否定的。考虑仅通过未解释竞价分量的联合分布耦合的竞价代理,每个代理自身的报价分布恰好处于竞争水平。任何仅依赖单个代理价格或竞价历史的检验,其检验力始终等于假阳性率,无论耦合强度如何,直至完全同单调。因此,现有检测方法并非因样本量不足而失效,而是结构性盲视。三个实证结果表明:第一,真实语言模型代理中存在显著残余相关性(+0.053),跨模型仅为+0.0001,95%区间为[0.030, 0.078];第二,采样温度升高时耦合单调下降(p=0.002),提示可调节参数作为缓解手段;第三,在77,684次以太坊区块构建拍卖数据中,诚实竞标者对之间的依赖程度已高到需将审计阈值设于+0.50至+0.81之间,是家族错误率阈值的20至32倍,且不随窗口扩大而降低。由于合法多身份操作与共谋行为在此处不可区分,可行的监管目标是计数而非检测——将40个竞价身份归并为23个运营商,使赫芬达尔指数提升247.5%,结合公开竞价流的行为聚类可达324.5%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Empirical work on algorithmic collusion asks one question of the data: are prices supracompetitive? We show this can be answered "no" by a conspiracy that is nonetheless profitable. Consider bidding agents that couple only through the joint distribution of their unexplained bid components, leaving every agent's own bid law exactly at the competitive law. Any test whose input is a single agent's price or bid history then has power exactly equal to its false-positive rate, for every coupling strength up to comonotonicity. The published detection methodology is therefore blind to this conduct by construction rather than underpowered, and no sample size repairs it. Three empirical results follow. First, the mechanism appears in real language-model agents: twenty models from nineteen independent developers, three deployment prompts each, show residual correlation of $+0.053$ between two deployments of one model against $+0.0001$ across models, with a 95% interval clustered by developer of $[0.030, 0.078]$, under an auditor that sees every order feature and is fitted out of sample. Second, the coupling falls monotonically as sampling temperature rises ($p=0.002$), turning a deployment parameter into a candidate mitigation. Third, on 24 days of Ethereum block-building auction data covering 77,684 bids from 39 bidders, the honest population of bidder pairs is itself so dependent that a screen held at a 5% false-positive rate must sit above a floor of $+0.50$ to $+0.81$, which is 20 to 32 times the family-wise sampling threshold and does not fall as the audit window grows. Since lawful multi-identity operation and conspiracy are behaviourally indistinguishable here, the tractable regulatory target is not detection but counting: resolving 40 bidding identities into 23 operators raises the Herfindahl index by 247.5%, and adding behavioural clusters from public bid streams reaches 324.5%.

算法共谋价格审计博弈论区块链

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