Is Your LLM-as-a-Recommender Agent Trustable? LLMs' Recommendation is Easily Hacked by Biases (Preferences)

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are gradually exploited in practically valuable agentic workflows such as Deep Research, E-commerce recommendation, job recruitment. In these applications, LLMs need to select some optimal solutions from massive candidates, which we term as LLM-as-a-Recommender paradigm. However, the reliability of using LLM agents for recommendations is underexplored. In this work, we introduce a Bias Recommendation Benchmark (BiasRecBench) to highlight the critical vulnerability of such agents to biases in high-value real-world tasks. The benchmark includes three practical domains: paper review, e-commerce, and job recruitment. We construct a Bias Synthesis Pipeline with Calibrated Quality Margins that 1) synthesizes evaluation data by controlling the quality gap between optimal and sub-optimal options to provide a calibrated testbed to elicit the vulnerability to biases; 2) injects contextual biases that are logical and suitable for option contexts. Extensive experiments on both SOTA (Gemini-2.5,3-pro, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1) and small-scale LLMs reveal that agents frequently succumb to injected biases despite having sufficient reasoning capabilities to identify the ground truth. These findings expose a significant reliability bottleneck in current agentic workflows, calling for specialized alignment strategies for LLM-as-a-Recommender.