@inproceedings{zheng-etal-2026-market,
    title = "Market-Bench: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Economic and Trade Competition",
    author = "Zheng, Yushuo  and
      Duan, Huiyu  and
      Zhang, Zicheng  and
      Zhu, Yucheng  and
      Min, Xiongkuo  and
      Zhai, Guangtao",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1853/",
    pages = "39893--39906",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "The ability of large language models (LLMs) to manage and acquire economic resources remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Market-Bench}, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of LLMs in economically-relevant tasks through economic and trade competition. Specifically, we construct a configurable multi-agent supply chain economic model where LLMs act as retailer agents responsible for procuring and retailing merchandise. In the \textbf{procurement} stage, LLMs bid for limited inventory in budget-constrained auctions. In the \textbf{retail} stage, LLMs set retail prices, generate marketing slogans, and provide them to buyers through a role-based attention mechanism for purchase. Market-Bench logs complete trajectories of bids, prices, slogans, sales, and balance-sheet states, enabling automatic evaluation with economic, operational, and semantic metrics. Benchmarking on 20 open- and closed-source LLM agents reveals significant performance disparities and winner-take-most phenomenon, \textit{i.e.}, only a small subset of LLM retailers can consistently achieve capital appreciation, while many hover around the break-even point despite similar semantic matching scores. Market-Bench provides a reproducible testbed for studying how LLMs interact in competitive markets."
}