\section{Literature Review}

To better understand all wedges of the current works, we must start by exploring the nature of agents, agentic computer use and web automation, complementing that with economic reasoning and strategic interaction. The final surface to cover, leads us to data-driven dynamic pricing under uncertainty. The key technical risk is not ``agents buying things'' per se, but agents shaping the behavioral and demand signals that downstream pricing systems consume and depend on. This latter case of agents shopping is currently pending legal action in the case of \textcite{noauthor_amazoncom_2026} which is currently being treated as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The introduction of these mediating actor entities into economic systems, is further creating a threat of false-name bidding \parencite{yokoo_effect_2004}, which prior research has explored in a trading context. Other research on pseudonyms in dynamic systems, demonstrate whitewashing in AI agents which can ignore defensive mechanisms by re-entry with different identities \parencite{feldman_free-riding_2004}. Dynamic pricing assumes demand proxies are behaviorally meaningful, while bot detection aims at security and access control. The missing bridge is a principled framework for distinguishing non-human reconnaissance from genuine human demand expression and integrating that distinguishability into pricing heuristics without degrading legitimate user experience (in our research tracked by the user-experience index). This gap, is what our contribution aims to address, particularly for the aforementioned stakeholder groups.

\subsection{Agent Taxonomy and Definitions}

An agent in the context of artificial intelligence is generally defined by anything that can reason and act upon observations of its environments (collected through some sensory inputs) and carry out actions through effectors. Moreover, a rational agent is an entity that is capable of perceiving the world around them and taking actions to advance specified goals. This definition by \textcite{russell_artificial_2021} is further developed in an economic context by \textcite{parkes_economic_2015}, suggesting AI research attempts to construct a synthetic \textit{homo economicus}, which may also be termed \textit{machina economicus}.
A specific class or taxon of this \textit{machina economicus}, the Large Language Model (LLM) agent, is defined as an autonomous system capable of achieving goals and adapting post-training, often without needing explicit code or fundamental model changes \parencite{xia_evaluation-driven_2025}.

We must however acknowledge the current SOTA as presented by OSWORLD simulations by \textcite{xie_osworld_2024} have demonstrated that multi-modal tasks across desktop and web interaction modes, have a top-performing score of only 12.24\% success, whereas humans have a higher 72\% success rate; this is linked to the lack of grounding of these agents and their inability of handling unexpected errors. This weakness matters for this research because it clarifies the near-term threat model: practical exploitation does not require a fully competent ``computer assistant'', only enough automation to perform high-volume reconnaissance actions (search/filter/open product pages, probe availability/price boundaries) that can contaminate behavioral signals. With the expected growth of these capabilities, this threat only becomes more perilous to revenue management systems.

We model an agent session as producing some events with lower in-session conversion levels relative to humans, this we state in our assumption that $P(\text{purchase} \vert A) < P(\text{purchase} \vert H)$ but with a potentially higher volatility in $\hat{q}$, which we observe through the look-to-book metrics in our simulation.

\subsection{Economic Agents: From Homo Economicus to Machina Economicus}

Existing behavioral economic models tend to be criticized for the assumption of rational behavior, as is embodied in the term of homo economicus. The definition of a machina economicus by \textcite{parkes_economic_2015} is quite appropriate for our case, particularly because these assumptions of rationality have been argued to be a very adequate reference for AI research by \textcite{varian_economic_1995} due to its expected utility maximizing nature. For modeling this behavior, the trajectories of these agents can be formally defined to be partially observable Markov decision processes \parencite{xie_osworld_2024}. Agents are however not to be confused with web-bots which have previously been known as automated software applications or scrapers which are set with a purpose of carrying out specific tasks on the internet, without a higher level of internal judgement \parencite{imperva_rapid_2025}. In our research, we refer to this actor simply as an Agent belonging to the distribution $A$.

This economic framing also helps separate two related but distinct phenomena of agents as buyers (changing market demand composition), and agents as information gatherers (changing the observed interactions used by pricing/recommendation systems). The thesis focuses on the second, where information acquisition strategically precedes purchase execution. We do not however dismiss the proposed expectation that existing economic systems serving humans, will not be populated by AIs across multiple channels and with various possibly misaligned goals as stated by \textcite{parkes_economic_2015}.

A HAP (HTTP Agent Profile) protocol has been developed as an internet draft by \textcite{dhir_http_2025} in an effort to separate agentic and human internet traffic, however the majority adoption by both the sellers and agent providers would be required for the implementation of such a solution.

\subsection{Problem Evidence and Market Impact}

The statistical issue of contamination in dynamic pricing systems that observe demand features as a means to update prices has been documented in various previous contexts. The airline industry (which has accounted for 24\% of observed disruptions) has seen malicious activity with a measureable impact on skewing key performance indicators by behavior visible in the look-to-book metrics. Excessive reconnaissance traffic inflates search volume without corresponding completed bookings, thereby skewing demand forecasts and disrupting dynamic pricing models. Demand proxies have also been observed to cause significant threat to inventory management by creating artificial scarcity that distorts the demand-supply relationships in the enterprise model. Censored demand as shown by \textcite{amjad_censored_2017} can also be observed in low-bias demand under-estimation caused by a distortion effect coming from non-human traffic data \parencite{imperva_rapid_2025}.

When dynamic pricing algorithms operate on highly contaminated or noisy data, the risk grows significantly in creating inaccurate price inferences. The emergent mitigation driven by un-informed reward and regret signals might lead to price suppression for sales continuity which results in harming margins and resulting in a revenue loss. System that poorly fit undesired behavior might result in price gouging, which calls for strong guardrails while preserving targeted business strategy \parencite{mullapudi_reinforcement_2025}.


%Documented instances of agent-driven market disruptions - Quantitative evidence of pricing manipulation - Case studies from affected industries

\subsection{Theoretical Foundations: Economic Parallels}


Early hints of exploration of prices in a standard English auction explored by \textcite{varian_economic_1995} which hints at exploration of prices in a sequential manner, which leads to a marginally different cost to the bidder than the reservation price of the seller. This is a setting in which there is no cost incured by the buyer for their actions or exploring prices in the market. They propose that any agent responsable for the pricing of a good must be imune to dynamic strategies which might extract private information from a market. A key take-away which relates to the Vickery auction mechanism (also called a \textit{direct mechanism}) suggests that not only would defenses against such exploitation be necessary, but the construction of a mechanism in which revelation of the true willingness to pay is the dominant strategy for commerce.

Like in classical revenue-maximizing auctions \parencite{roughgarden_cs364a_2013} we assume that the human actor in our system has a private valuation $v$ which we formally draw from intrinsically defined distributions. The important note here is that the agent proxy does not have a mechanism to convey this private information into the demand data which directly impacts the pricing systems.

The key component of this mediation between agents and commercial platforms lays in the transaction costs related to information gathering and negotiation. As proposed by \textcite{shahidi_coasean_2025} these costs are bound to collapse towards zero (which we demonstrate mathematically), calling for a re-evaluation of the boundaries between firms and markets. As argued by \textcite{coase_nature_1937}, the market participation and time associated with that participation, is critical part of the Coasean transaction cost logic which includes the discovery or relevant pricing within a given market. This process of price discovery without the presence of AI Agents can be time consuming and resource intensive. To build on top of this work we provide a proof of optimal conditions theorised by Coaes as an extension to AI-mediated markets.

% Economic foundations: relating the problem to options pricing theory. Cost of Information (COI) concept and its relevance



\subsection{Landscape of Existing Work}

Explorations of the algorithmic collusion by LLMs \parencite{fish_algorithmic_2025} has demonstrated a cross-model tendency of market division with a strong sensitivity to instructions provided in the ``system prompt''. If a dynamic pricing algorithm which is trained to respond to market signals learns to coordinate with competitor agents (or become manipulated by those agents), the market equilibrium is under threat of destabilization. This is particularly true for Q-learning pricing learners as demonstrated by \textcite{calvano_artificial_2018}.

Our effort to combat contamination stems from research by \textcite{hardt_strategic_2015} on strategic classification, in conjunction with \textcite{liu_contextual_2024} who demonstrate a linear regret if contamination is ignored. The strategic classification adversarial effect comes from an effort to manipulate some representative features used in a learning pipeline, which can result in lower prices on loans or lower prices from dynamic pricing algorithms.

To bridge the gap between detection and robust pricing, we look at work in Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). As defined by \textcite{kuhn_wasserstein_2024}, DRO provides a framework for decision-making under ambiguity, where the true data distribution is unknown but lies within a ``Wasserstein ball'' of a target distribution. In our context, the ``ambiguity set'' represents the uncertainty introduced by agentic reconnaissance. By optimizing for the worst-case distribution within this set, pricing mechanisms can become resilient to the distributional shifts such as the ones caused by non-human actors, effectively robustifying the revenue function against the contamination described in our problem statement.

In order to create an environment in which prices can be tested against a demand estimate generated by some behavioral model, we take inspiration from the architecture proposed by \textcite{ie_recsim_2019} in the RecSim platform built for recommendation systems. By modeling the distinct user behavior as POMDPs we can generate faithful interactions which allow us to generalize, past the constraint which is also present in recommendation systems, of rarely having enough experience with individual actor's interactions for good recommendations without generalization. The key inspiration comes from the user choice modeling which we translate to a user transition model for each distinct actor type (agent or human). We further consider the possibility of modeling our quantitative research platform using dynamic Bayesian networks for the sake of tractability within the system. The contribution or RecSim enables researchers to better understand learning algorithms in fixed environments, a gap we identify as needing to be bridged within the space of dynamic pricing.
% TODO: mention https://github.com/meta-pytorch/OpenEnv/tree/main/envs/browsergym_env

We also acknowledge the difficulty in similarly affected fields such as authorship, where \textcite{ganie_uncertainty_2025} demonstrate the theoretical limits of the distributional divergence between text authored by a human or large language model. Their approach of computing the divergence between two distributions demonstrates purely theoretically that no classifier can outperform random guessing on their particular task. This is yet another factor to take into consideration when exploring the potential mitigation strategies.

The setting of our work is quite complex and covers a wide range of topics, each with its own set of issues that further complicate the task at hand. There is however promise in the field of reinforcement learning and adversarial robustness to combat these problems. We can summarize the characteristics learned from the review of our environment as:
\begin{enumerate*}[label=(\roman*)]
\item non-stationary demand with temporal noise $\epsilon_t$
\item contaminated behavioral signals from mixed human-agent traffic with unknown mixing ratio $\alpha$
\item partial observability where only demand proxies $\hat{q}$ are available, not true demand $d(\cdot)$
\item strategic actors capable of feature manipulation to influence pricing outcomes
\item information asymmetry with private valuations $v$ drawn from unknown distributions
\item session-based interactions modeled as POMDPs with trajectories $\tau_s$
\item low conversion probability for agents: $P(\text{purchase} \mid A) < P(\text{purchase} \mid H)$
\item distributional uncertainty requiring robust optimization within Wasserstein ambiguity sets
\item potential for adversarial exploitation through false-name bidding and identity whitewashing.
\end{enumerate*}


%Previous efforts in adversarial computer use .LLM agents, show how multi-faceted the whole problem is
%Here we can show a market visualization (venn-like-diagram)
