What Makes a Sale? Rethinking End-to-End Seller--Buyer Retail Dynamics with LLM Agents

Evaluating retail strategies before deployment is difficult, as outcomes are determined across multiple stages, from seller-side persuasion through buyer-seller interaction to purchase decisions. However, existing retail simulators capture only partial aspects of this process and do not model cross-stage dependencies, making it difficult to assess how early decisions affect downstream outcomes. We present RetailSim, an end-to-end retail simulation framework that models this pipeline in a unified environment, explicitly designed for simulation fidelity through diverse product spaces, persona-driven agents, and multi-turn interactions. We evaluate RetailSim with a dual protocol comprising human evaluation of behavioral fidelity and meta-evaluation against real-world economic regularities, showing that it successfully reproduces key patterns such as demographic purchasing behavior, the price-demand relationship, and heterogeneous price elasticity. We further demonstrate its practical utility via decision-oriented use cases, including persona inference, seller-buyer interaction analysis, and sales strategy evaluation, showing RetailSim's potential as a controlled testbed for exploring retail strategies.

Enabling Delayed-Full Charging Through Transformer-Based Real-Time-to-Departure Modeling for EV Battery Longevity

Electric vehicles (EVs) are key to sustainable mobility, yet their lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) degrade more rapidly under prolonged high states of charge (SOC). This can be mitigated by delaying full charging \ours until just before departure, which requires accurate prediction of user departure times. In this work, we propose Transformer-based real-time-to-event (TTE) model for accurate EV departure prediction. Our approach represents each day as a TTE sequence by discretizing time into grid-based tokens. Unlike previous methods primarily dependent on temporal dependency from historical patterns, our method leverages streaming contextual information to predict departures. Evaluation on a real-world study involving 93 users and passive smartphone data demonstrates that our method effectively captures irregular departure patterns within individual routines, outperforming baseline models. These results highlight the potential for practical deployment of the \ours algorithm and its contribution to sustainable transportation systems.