This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an open-source simulated digital marketplace where intelligent agents, powered by language models, buy and sell information on behalf of external participants. The central mechanism enabling this marketplace is the agents' dual capabilities: they not only have the capacity to assess the quality of privileged information but also come equipped with the ability to forget. This ability to induce amnesia allows vendors to grant temporary access to proprietary information, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized retention while enabling agents to accurately gauge the information's relevance to specific queries or tasks. To perform well, agents must make rational decisions, strategically explore the marketplace through generated sub-queries, and synthesize answers from purchased information. Concretely, our experiments (a) uncover biases in language models leading to irrational behavior and evaluate techniques to mitigate these biases, (b) investigate how price affects demand in the context of informational goods, and (c) show that inspection and higher budgets both lead to higher quality outcomes.

翻译：本文针对信息市场中的“买方检验悖论”展开研究。该悖论表现为：买方需获取信息以评估其价值，而卖方则需限制信息访问以防止剽窃。为探究这一问题，我们构建了一个开源模拟数字市场，其中由语言模型驱动的智能代理代表外部参与者进行信息买卖。该市场的核心机制在于代理的双重能力：它们不仅具备评估专有信息质量的能力，还拥有“遗忘”机制。这种诱导失忆的能力使卖方能够授予对专有信息的临时访问权限，在显著降低信息被未授权留存风险的同时，使代理能精确判断信息对特定查询或任务的相关性。为实现良好绩效，代理需做出理性决策，通过生成的子查询策略性地探索市场，并从购买信息中综合答案。具体而言，我们的实验：(a)揭示了导致非理性行为的语言模型偏差，并评估了缓解偏差的技术；(b)探究价格如何影响信息商品需求；(c)表明信息检验与更高预算均能带来更优质量结果。