Selective Elicitation as a Commercial Influence Channel: A Reproducible Synthetic Shopping-Agent Stress Test

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.36614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 while omitting the rival's advantage. Across 40 held-out