TradeWar: A Benchmark for Execution-Grounded Trade Negotiation with Adaptive LLM Agents
TL;DR
TACTIC (Trade-aware Adaptive Consolidation and Theory-of-mind for International Commerce), an agent that iteratively refines its negotiation strategy across episodes-without updating base LLM weights-by leveraging prior experience, opponent behavior, and past settlement outcomes is proposed.
Abstract
Multi-turn negotiation remains a challenging problem for large language model (LLM) agents. While LLMs can conduct natural-language dialogue, existing benchmarks predominantly assess only agreement rates, overlooking whether negotiated commitments actually create value once executed. To address this gap, we introduce TradeWar, a multi-country simulation benchmark that translates negotiation dialogues into concrete tariff and trade-share policies, enforces capacity and network constraints during settlement, and evaluates outcomes via an Economic Health Index (EHI). To solve this execution-grounded task, we propose TACTIC (Trade-aware Adaptive Consolidation and Theory-of-mind for International Commerce), an agent that iteratively refines its negotiation strategy across episodes-without updating base LLM weights-by leveraging prior experience, opponent behavior, and past settlement outcomes. Despite using zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, PromptLLM attains a 75% agreement rate but only 57.1 final EHI (*100), whereas TACTIC reaches 68.8. Across 20 sequential episodes and three seeds, TACTIC's final EHI improves from 58.2 to 73.2, compared with 65.2 for an ablation without cross-episode updates. Under technology-controls and energy-crisis shocks, TACTIC also exhibits smaller performance degradation than PromptLLM and MemoryLLM. These results indicate that CoT deliberation and interaction memory alone do not fully address delayed execution feedback, whereas settlement-grounded adaptation improves long-horizon negotiation in TradeWar.
