Learning to Sell: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Large Language Model Agents in Multi-Product Markets
TL;DR
This paper develops a machine learning approach for training such agents to act effectively as sellers in a multi-item bargaining environment, where a seller concurrently negotiates a catalog of substitutable assets across a pool of independent buyers.
Abstract
Autonomous large language model (LLM) agents operating in multi-product markets must make sequential decisions under information asymmetry and resource constraints. We develop a machine learning approach for training such agents to act effectively as sellers in a multi-item bargaining environment, where a seller concurrently negotiates a catalog of substitutable assets across a pool of independent buyers. Buyers hold private, heterogeneous valuations across products, and each can purchase at most one item. Facing limits on total communication turns, the seller must dynamically match buyers with the most profitable products considering their private valuations, while strategically allocating its limited interaction budget toward combinations of greater potential value. We formalize this problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process using a structured, four-part message protocol that maps natural language into a parsable and regulated decision space. Using this formalization, we design a post-training method using Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). To evaluate this framework, we construct a multidimensional metric suite that quantifies constraint adherence, seller surplus extraction, and allocation quality. Our trained seller agent learns to match limited inventory to buyers more effectively, matching or outperforming trillion-parameter frontier models in both seller surplus extraction and buyer-product allocation quality. Finally, these learned strategies generalize robustly to unseen market structures, correlated valuation distributions, and price ranges not encountered during training.
