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

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 sponsorship-assignment cases (20 distinct catalog-preference contexts), the soft instruction changes no selections. The targeted instruction raises sponsored selection by 0.30 and reduces mean synthetic utility by 0.0547 relative to neutral questioning (95% context-bootstrap interval [-0.0828, -0.0291]) for one language-model recommender. A fixed Bayesian recommender shows a similar effect; a second model makes the same choices on all 120 frozen question-answer inputs. A terminal-answer consistency judge rates all 20 sampled targeted answers consistent, although five have synthetic regret above 0.05; a separate question-coverage dimension flags their one-sided elicitation. A robust partial-preference certificate remains valid under the stipulated synthetic utility but certifies only 16 of 40 targeted cases and is not better than asking a neutral question directly. These results establish neither typical behavior under advertising incentives nor effects on actual consumers.