LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Simulating Strategic and Goal-Oriented Data Marketplaces

Abstract--Data marketplaces, which mediate the purchase and exchange of data from third parties, have attracted growing attention for reducing the cost and effort of data collection while enabling the trading of diverse datasets. However, a systematic understanding of the interactions between market participants, data, and regulations remains limited. T o address this gap, we propose a Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent System (LLM-MAS) for data marketplaces. In our framework, buyer and seller agents powered by LLMs operate with explicit objectives and autonomously perform strategic actions, such as--planning, searching, purchasing, pricing, and updating data. These agents can reason about market dynamics, forecast future demand, and adapt their strategies accordingly. Unlike conventional model-based simulations, which are typically constrained to predefined rules, LLM-MAS supports broader and more adaptive behavior selection through natural language reasoning. We evaluated the framework via simulation experiments using three distribution-based metrics: (1) the number of purchases per dataset, (2) the number of purchases per buyer, and (3) the number of repeated purchases of the same dataset. The results demonstrate that LLM-MAS more faithfully reproduces trading patterns observed in real data marketplaces compared to traditional approaches, and further captures the emergence and evolution of market trends. Data have emerged as a tradable economic resource, and data marketplaces that mediate the purchase and exchange of datasets from third parties have rapidly expanded [1]. These marketplaces streamline data collection that previously required substantial cost and effort, while also providing organizations and researchers with access to diverse, high-quality datasets. As a result, they are increasingly recognized as critical infrastructures that accelerate innovation based on data that were closed within individual organizations [2]. Despite this progress, our understanding of how interactions among market participants, data, and regulations shape market dynamics remains limited. Smooth and efficient data transactions require well-designed and robust data marketplaces [3].