{"slug": "knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi", "title": "Knowing Whom to Trust is not Enough: The Trust--Agreement Gap in Repeated Multi-Party LLM Negotiation", "summary": "A new arXiv paper (2610.31971v1) finds a \"trust–agreement gap\" in repeated multi-party LLM negotiations: trust-aware agents can identify a covert adversary within a few games, but accurate trust estimates do not consistently produce better agreements. In the authors' repeated, multi-party, multi-issue negotiation framework, explicit trust raised agreement rates by up to 23 percentage points, but only when agents were explicitly guided to use it in their decisions. The results indicate that the value of trust modeling for LLM negotiators depends critically on how trust is assessed and incorporated into agents' reasoning.", "body_md": "arXiv:2610.31971v1 Announce Type: new \nAbstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly participate in negotiations on behalf of individuals and organizations, yet they remain vulnerable to manipulation, particularly in repeated multi-party interactions. Classical multi-agent systems address this challenge through explicit trust and reputation models, whereas existing work on LLM negotiation largely treats trust as an emergent phenomenon. We investigate whether LLM agents can form useful trust estimates from prior interactions and leverage them to improve future negotiation outcomes. We introduce a repeated, multi-party, multi-issue negotiation framework in which recurring agents participate in a sequence of negotiation games while one participant covertly attempts to prevent agreement. After each game, agents assess their counterparts and maintain pairwise trust estimates that carry over to subsequent negotiations. We compare trust-aware and trust-agnostic agents and analyze how explicit trust influences negotiation outcomes. Our results reveal a \\emph{trust--agreement gap}: trust-aware agents can identify the adversary within a few games, but accurate trust estimates do not consistently translate into better agreements. Trust increases agreement rates by up to 23 percentage points, but only when agents are explicitly guided to use it in their decisions. Explicit trust can therefore improve repeated LLM negotiations, but its value depends critically on how trust is assessed and incorporated into agents' reasoning.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31971", "published_at": "2026-10-26 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-26 04:14:36.087682+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["arXiv", "2610.31971v1"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/knowing-whom-to-trust-is-not-enough-the-trust-agreement-gap-in-repeated-multi.jsonld"}}