CABAL: Multi-Agent Simulacra for Tracing the Effects of Collusive Bidding in Peer Review
arXiv:2609.05227v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent reports during the AAAI-27 review cycle highlight the risk of reviewers coordinating bids for reciprocal assignment advantage. Prior work treats bidding, reviewer assignment, and review manipulation as separate stages, leaving the lifecycle effects of collusive bidding unclear. Real-world analysis is further constrained by typically unobservable collusive intent and the lack of counterfactuals for the same conference. Motivated by this…