Business Arena, a controlled environment where an AI agent runs a cross-border shop, buying from suppliers and selling to buyers over a long horizon, is introduced, taking a first step toward a realistic and trustworthy testbed for evaluating end-to-end business agents.
Abstract
Running a business is a challenging form of intelligent work. Operators must infer opportunities from partial signals, commit capital under uncertainty, adapt to delayed outcomes in a changing market, and satisfy regulatory obligations before trading legally. Frontier LLM agents can increasingly complete complex workflows, yet business-related capabilities are rarely evaluated in existing agent benchmarks. We introduce \textbf{Business Arena}, a controlled environment where an AI agent runs a cross-border shop, buying from suppliers and selling to buyers over a long horizon. We ground the arena in real Alibaba.com sourcing data and market conditions calibrated from authoritative sources. Delayed and coupled consequences make individual business decisions difficult to judge, but their combined outcome is measurable through profit. Because profit alone cannot explain why an agent succeeds or fails, we compare agents with human-designed strategies to estimate available opportunity, use skill-level metrics to reveal underlying strengths and weaknesses, and trace realized gains and losses to the actions that produced them. We use mechanism ablations to establish that strong results reflect genuine business intelligence rather than neglect or simulator-specific shortcuts. We evaluate 15 frontier models and find a ninefold difference in mean final net worth. Even the best model falls behind human-designed strategies, indicating that business operation remains challenging for LLM agents. Skill-level analysis reveals operating styles, from margin-focused premium sellers to high-turnover wholesalers and customer-service specialists, while action-level attribution identifies the sourcing, pricing, and recovery decisions that create or destroy value. Together, Business Arena takes a first step toward a realistic and trustworthy testbed for evaluating end-to-end business agents.
E-Commerce Bench is introduced, the first open-source benchmark that integrates multi-round counterpart negotiation and dynamic events into a year-long business operation, and it is found that no single model dominates.
Wei Fan, Xin-Jie Shen, Xu-Dong Guo et al.· 0 citations
Large language model agents are increasingly evaluated as autonomous tool users, yet most benchmarks focus on bounded tasks with immediate success criteria. Real-world deployments often require Long-Term Coherence, the capacity to preserve purposeful behavior across extended horizons while adapting decisions to accumulated evidence. Evaluating this capacity requires a persistent environment in which actions constrain future choices, feedback arrives at heterogeneous delays, and incoherent behavior produces measurable cumulative effects. Seller-side e-commerce provides a suitable setting for this evaluation through recurrent and interdependent decisions over Product Sourcing, Listing and Pricing Control, Cash-Flow Management, and Mixed-Latency Feedback Adaptation. We introduce MerchantBench, a 365-day order-level simulation grounded in 98,843 real e-commerce product records and equipped with 26 tools for agent interaction. MerchantBench couples promptly observable Upstream Supplier Events with delayed Downstream Order Outcomes, requiring agents to follow individual order lifecycles and revisit earlier decisions. We evaluate eight LLMs under two agent frameworks in 48 runs, each spanning 365 simulated days. Our results reveal a substantial gap between even the latest LLMs and human participants, with the best LLM configuration attaining only 27.3\% of the mean final net assets achieved by human participants.
Qi-Ming Shi, Yulong Tao, Linbo Jin et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed for enterprise workflows, yet existing evaluations rarely test whether business-decision conclusions transfer across competitive market ecologies. We introduce ERPBench, an execution-instrumented benchmark for enterprise decision agents in a six-round Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) simulation with coupled pricing, production, procurement, inventory, finance, and shared-market competition. ERPBench evaluates the same 100 fixed problems in two matched competitive market ecologies: Solo, where each evaluated LLM agent competes against fixed rule-based opponents, and Arena, where six evaluated LLM agents compete in a shared market. Across six model families, this yields 1,200 model-level trajectories spanning 7,200 decision rounds. Under the observed service configuration, the leading model differs between ecologies: DeepSeek leads in Solo (252.29M mean valuation; mean rank 1.67), whereas Gemini leads in Arena (263.95M; 1.76). The two ecologies identify the same task-level winner on only 21 of 100 problems, and Gemini's bottom-rank rate falls from 22 % to 0 % in Arena. ERPBench supports paired evaluation of whether enterprise-agent rankings transfer across competitive market ecologies, supplemented by aggregate execution-intervention analysis. Code and benchmark resources are available in our https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/erp-bench.
Xin-Ran Zhang, Peng-Rui Lu, Lyumanshan Ye et al.· 0 citations
As LLM agents proliferate, built by different parties and with different capabilities and costs, orchestrating them is more like assembling labor across the economy than a computer calling a subroutine. Existing orchestration is typically centralized, with a single planner assigning every task, but this creates a bottleneck as agent pools grow, requires private information (e.g., agents'execution costs), and can easily be manipulated, such that a single inserted preference nearly doubles a favored agent's task share under a centralized LLM allocator. We introduce AgentLance, a repeated labor market in which agents bid on tasks using their private costs and self-maintained strategy notes, an allocator selects winners from bids and public reputation records, and a VCG-style payment rule rewards cost-aware bidding. Complex tasks are handled by hierarchical delegation: winning agents can decompose work and subcontract it through the same mechanism. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, knowledge-intensive QA, and agentic tasks, AgentLance matches agents to their specializations, shifts work toward cheaper agents as cost sensitivity rises, and consistently outperforms single-model, centralized-orchestration, and market baselines. Diagnosing market failures, including inaccurate cost self-estimation and sub-optimal bidding, then correcting them in controlled experiments yields further gains, charting a path toward more efficient agent economies.
Xiao Liu, Haoyang Li, Songwei Li et al.· 0 citations
Quantitative trading is moving from isolated predictive models toward agentic workflows that combine reasoning, tool use, memory, and feedback. This survey reviews agentic quantitative trading across five stages: factor mining, signal discovery, portfolio construction, order execution, and risk management. We further examine agentic quant trading systems through architecture, coordination, and adaptation, while comparing benchmarks across strategy construction, offline trading, live market evaluation, and reliability assessment. Our review finds that current systems remain concentrated on signal discovery, while complete integration with portfolio construction, execution, and risk control is still uncommon. Multi-agent systems also rely heavily on aggregation despite increasingly diverse workflow structures. Benchmark evidence further shows that strong model or forecasting capability does not reliably translate into trading performance under live market conditions and reliability controls. We conclude with future directions for more complete trading workflows, stronger coordination, and evaluation matched to the capability being assessed.
Feng-Rui Hua, Heng-Yi Yang, Xinqing Hao et al.· 1 citation
We present a continuous, population-scale measurement record of autonomous language-model trading agents operating in production across two systems with one design lineage: DX Terminal Pro (3,505 user-funded vaults trading real ETH in Base memecoin markets for 21 days, February to March 2026) and the DXAP live alpha fleet (500 to 599 user-created agents all-history, 91 to 117 concurrently active, trading Hyperliquid perpetuals, June to August 2026). The record spans roughly six months, 7.5M single-model invocations with about 300K onchain actions, and a further 231,638 multi-tool turns producing 14,596 fills. Four findings carry the paper. First, the operating layer determines behavior more than anything written in strategy text: a risk slider explains leverage (+0.425 per level), agent fixed effects absorb 60% of variance, and a leaderboard render boundary causally routes selection (regression discontinuity 1.75x at the top-3 cut). Second, sizing is volatility-blind: median leverage is 5.0x in every volatility sextile, and one posture-slider cell (11% of the book) holds 62% of liquidations. Third, agents capture almost none of the upside they reach: 43.2% of positions saw at least +300 bps of favorable excursion within 24h, yet 49.3% of those closed with a negative trade return; a mechanical bracket recovers +39.0 bps per position. Fourth, neither fleet shows a directional edge. The DXAP fleet is not profitable and trails a matched Hyperliquid retail benchmark (41% vs. 50% roundtrip win rate). A paired-replay league of frontier models on 416 captured production scenarios finds decision quality statistically indistinguishable at this horizon, while choice stability differs sharply across model families. Every headline survives day-clustered inference, permutation nulls, and a common-fee restatement; the paper closes with a 17-rule methodology canon bought with our own retractions.
T. Barton, Chris Constantakis, Patti Hauseman et al.· 0 citations
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