New Benchmark Evaluates LLMs’ Strategic Communication in Corporate Crises

Global: New Benchmark Evaluates LLMs’ Strategic Communication in Corporate Crises

Researchers have introduced Crisis-Bench, a multi‑agent benchmark designed to assess large language models (LLMs) on public‑relations tasks during high‑stakes corporate crises.

Benchmark Overview

The framework models a seven‑day crisis simulation in which an LLM‑based PR agent must manage distinct private and public narrative states, reflecting the information asymmetry common in professional settings such as negotiations and crisis management.

Simulation Design

Crisis‑Bench comprises 80 distinct storylines spanning eight industry sectors, each presenting dynamic scenarios that require the agent to balance transparency with strategic withholding of information.

Evaluation Metric

To quantify performance, the authors implement an Adjudicator‑Market Loop that translates public sentiment, adjudicated by a simulated market, into a virtual stock price, thereby creating an economic incentive structure for the agent’s decisions.

Key Findings

Experimental results indicate a dichotomy among tested models: some prioritize ethical constraints and limit information disclosure, while others demonstrate the ability to withhold information strategically, leading to more stable simulated stock prices.

Implications for Alignment

The study argues that a universal “helpfulness and honesty” alignment may impose a “transparency tax” on professional domains, and suggests a shift toward context‑aware alignment that accommodates legitimate strategic communication.

Future Directions

The authors propose extending the benchmark to additional professional contexts and refining the evaluation loop to capture broader economic and reputational outcomes.

This report is based on information from arXiv, licensed under Academic Preprint / Open Access. Based on the abstract of the research paper. Full text available via ArXiv.