This paper investigates formal mechanisms that allow self-interested agents to maintain market stability despite the tendency toward defection in social dilemmas. Using a multi-agent marketplace simulation with 18 DeepSeek-V3 agents, the study identifies Mediation as the most effective mechanism for sustaining trade within a constrained social network.
- The research compares eight conditions under progressive troll injection over 200 rounds, identifying Mediation as the top-performing mechanism.
- Adversarial red-teaming using iteratively prompt-optimized LLM-driven trolls found that the best attack (v6) reduces honest-agent utility by 13.3% but cannot collapse the market.
- Mediation enables recovery even under sustained adversarial pressure, demonstrating robustness defined as the ability to sustain positive honest-agent utility under optimized attack.
The authors conclude that Mediation is robust because it can be bent but not broken, providing a viable framework for maintaining stability in societies of self-interested agents.