Delegated Consumption

Definition: The principal-agent relationship created when a human consumer delegates purchasing authority to an autonomous AI agent, transferring not merely search and comparison but judgement itself.

Delegated Consumption is the theoretical foundation of the Shopper Schism®. When a consumer instructs an AI agent to "buy me the best running shoes for trail running under £150," the consumer has delegated the shopper function. The agent becomes the consumer's proxy in the marketplace, exercising judgement on the consumer's behalf about what constitutes "best," how to weigh price against performance, and which trade-offs are acceptable.

This delegation creates three distinct pathways for agency cost — the economic term for the losses that occur when an agent's actions do not perfectly serve the principal's interests:

1. Consumer-Agent Misalignment: The agent's optimisation logic may not perfectly capture the consumer's preferences. A consumer who values "sustainability" may mean organic materials; the agent may interpret this as carbon-neutral shipping. The gap between what the consumer wants and what the agent optimises for is an agency cost borne by the consumer.

2. Platform-Consumer Misalignment (The Shadow Principal Problem): The platform operating the agent has its own commercial interests — revenue, margin, vendor relationships. When the platform's interests influence the agent's decisions, the consumer faces a misalignment they may never detect. The agent appears to serve the consumer, but it also serves the platform. The platform is the "shadow principal."

3. Temporal Instability: Consumer preferences change over time, but the agent's model of those preferences may lag. A consumer who has become vegetarian may continue to receive meat-based meal kit recommendations because the agent's preference model has not been updated. The gap between evolving preferences and the agent's static model is a temporal agency cost.

Introduced in: Accornero, P.F. (2025). "Information Asymmetry and Moral Hazard in AI-Mediated Commerce." SSRN #5510221. Expanded in SSRN #6111766, pp. 22–23.

Related concepts: The Shopper Schism® | The Shadow Principal Problem | Agentic Commerce