Selective Elicitation as a Commercial Influence Channel: A Reproducible Synthetic Shopping-Agent Stress Test
A commercial incentive need not enter the final ranking algorithm to affect a shopping assistant's recommendation: it may instead influence which preference question the assistant asks. We make this distinction experimentally observable in a deliberately small, synthetic setting. Each task has two products, three verified numerical attributes, a price limit, and a private fixed preference vector. An honest simulated user answers one pairwise question. A separate recommender receives the products and this answer but not the sponsorship assignment. We contrast a neutral question, a soft commercial instruction, and an explicitly adversarial instruction to ask about the sponsor's advantage wh...
| Authors | Jiapeng Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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