The Poisoned Apple Effect: Strategic Manipulation of Mediated Markets via Technology Expansion of AI Agents

arXiv:2601.11496v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The integration of AI agents into economic markets fundamentally alters the landscape of strategic interaction. We investigate the economic implications of expanding the set of available technologies in three canonical game-theoretic settings: bargaining (resource division), negotiation (asymmetric information trade), and persuasion (strategic information transmission). We find that simply increasing the choice of AI delegates can drastic