AI agents are increasingly used in consumer-facing applications to assist with tasks such as product search, negotiation, and transaction execution. In this paper, we explore a future scenario where both consumers and merchants authorize AI agents to fully automate negotiations and transactions. We aim to answer two key questions: (1) Do different LLM agents vary in their ability to secure favorable deals for users? (2) What risks arise from fully automating deal-making with AI agents in consumer markets? To address these questions, we develop an experimental framework that evaluates the performance of various LLM agents in real-world negotiation and transaction settings. Our findings reveal that AI-mediated deal-making is an inherently imbalanced game -- different agents achieve significantly different outcomes for their users. Moreover, behavioral anomalies in LLMs can result in financial losses for both consumers and merchants, such as overspending or accepting unreasonable deals. These results underscore that while automation can improve efficiency, it also introduces substantial risks. Users should exercise caution when delegating business decisions to AI agents.

In their experiment, the researchers had AI models play the roles of buyers and sellers in three scenarios, negotiating deals for electronics, motor vehicles, and real estate. Each seller agent received the product's specs, wholesale cost, and retail price, with instructions to maximize profit. Buyer agents, in contrast, were given a budget, the retail price, and ideal product requirements and were tasked with driving the price down. Each agent had some, but not all, relevant details. This setup mimics many real-world negotiation conditions, where parties lack full visibility into each other's constraints or objectives.

Unlike routine tasks where consistency is prized, in creativity and innovation the goal is to create a diverse set of ideas. This paper delves into the burgeoning interest in employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the productivity and quality of the idea generation process. While previous studies have found that the average quality of AI ideas is quite high, prior research also has pointed to the inability of AI-based brainstorming to create sufficient dispersion of ideas, which limits novelty and the quality of the overall best idea. Our research investigates methods to increase the dispersion in AI-generated ideas. Using GPT-4, we explore the effect of different prompting methods on Cosine Similarity, the number of unique ideas, and the speed with which the idea space gets exhausted. We do this in the domain of developing a new product development for college students, priced under $50. In this context, we find that (1) pools of ideas generated by GPT-4 with various plausible prompts are less diverse than ideas generated by groups of human subjects (2) the diversity of AI generated ideas can be substantially improved using prompt engineering (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting leads to the highest diversity of ideas of all prompts we evaluated and was able to come close to what is achieved by groups of human subjects. It also was capable of generating the highest number of unique ideas of any prompt we studied.

Demand response (DR) has been demonstrated to be an effective method for reducing peak load and mitigating uncertainties on both the supply and demand sides of the electricity market. One critical question for DR research is how to appropriately adjust electricity prices in order to shift electrical load from peak to off-peak hours. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to address the price-based DR problem because it is a model-free technique that does not necessitate the identification of models for end-use customers. However, the majority of RL methods cannot guarantee the stability and optimality of the learned pricing policy, which is undesirable in safety-critical power systems and may result in high customer bills. In this paper, we propose an innovative nonparametric constrained policy optimization approach that improves optimality while ensuring stability of the policy update, by removing the restrictive assumption on policy representation that the majority of the RL literature adopts: the policy must be parameterized or fall into a certain distribution class. We derive a closed-form expression of optimal policy update for each iteration and develop an efficient on-policy actor-critic algorithm to address the proposed constrained policy optimization problem. The experiments on two DR cases show the superior performance of our proposed nonparametric constrained policy optimization method compared with state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

FOX Weather meteorologist Marissa Torres has the latest on the impact from Canadian wildfires on the Northeast's air quality and visibility on'Your World.' As wildfire smoke from northeastern Canada continues to drift to numerous cities in the United States, precautious Americans are actively searching for air purifiers that they can use for current and future air quality alerts. On Google, the term "best air purifier" has been highly searched in Washington, D.C., New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Hartford and New Haven, and other major metros in the northeast since Wednesday, June 7, according to data collected by Google Trends, a search engine analytics platform. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a "poor air quality alert" for parts of New England (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) on Wednesday, which was followed by similar announcements made by various city-level environmental and health agencies. "Wildfire smoke can rise more than 10 miles in the air and be carried hundreds of miles by wind currents," Dr.

Upgrading your home with the latest tech can be expensive, but Amazon Prime Day is an opportunity to do so for a lot less. Be it robot vacuums or smart bulbs, there are a whole lot of IoT and kitchen devices on sale today. Even some of our favorites from iRobot, Shark and Google have been discounted. Not all of the sales are actually worth your money, so we've done the hard work of narrowing that list down to the best deals available. One of our favorite smart thermostats is this one from Ecobee, so we're glad that it's on sale today for $178 ($71 off its retail price of $249).

Amazon has already started selling a bunch of its smart home devices at a discount, almost a week before Prime Day even begins. One of the most notable deals that's already available is Amazon's smart thermostat, which you can get for $42 -- as long as you're a Prime member. Amazon's smart thermostat debuted in September 2021, giving you an affordable option to control your home temperature. But it's Energy Star-certified and can save you an average of $50 on your electric bills every year. Plus, it's Alexa-compatible and allows you to use the voice assistant to set custom routines for heating and cooling.

The Nintendo Switch console is about to make history, becoming the video game maker's best-selling console ever. But if you want to buy a new Nintendo Switch OLED model to help put it over the top, they are still tough to find. In the U.S., Nintendo sold 314,000 Switch OLED units during the month of October (the console was released Oct. 8), Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser said, citing sales data from The NPD Group. Overall, Nintendo sold 711,000 Nintendo Switch systems during the month. Nintendo sold 3% more Switch units in October 2020, he said.

Aside from the usual deals on tech, Amazon Prime Day is also a great opportunity to snag that home or kitchen appliance you've always had your eye on. From smart thermostats to robot vacuums, there's a veritable smorgasbord of devices that are on sale today. Not all of them are worth your money, however, so we've done the hard work of narrowing the list down to what we think are the best deals out there. One of our favorite smart thermostats is this one from Ecobee, which is on sale today for $198 (you'll only get the price at checkout), which is 20 percent off its retail price of $249. The SmartThermostat has built-in Alexa voice support, which you can use to control the temperature, make a call or send a message.

Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Cyber Monday is almost over, but the best deals of the day are mostly still available. We've spent weeks preparing for the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. You can see our full list of the best Cyber Monday deals, but below you'll find the top 20. Some of these items are at the best prices we've ever seen and encompass things such as Hulu, Playstation Plus, Coach bags, iRobot Roomba vacuums, Apple Watches, Rokus and more.