Loop-Back Authority in LLM Agent Teams: A Paired Experiment on Flat and Hierarchical Coordination

Abstract:Hierarchical orchestration, in which a Manager agent reviews worker output and can send it back for revision, is the default coordination pattern in production multi-agent LLM frameworks. Classical organizational theory predicts that the authority link speeds convergence on decisive output; work on sycophancy and Degeneration-of-Thought predicts that authoritative critique makes LLM output worse. Prior comparisons vary whole frameworks on tasks with checkable answers, leaving the authority link untested on open-ended work. We present a paired experiment that holds five LLM agents, their roles, prompts, tools, models, and data fixed and varies one link: whether the Manager may reject a worker's output and oblige a revision. Across 43 paired products and 86 runs of a business-intelligence reporting task, a five-model judge panel and a deterministic specification check score every report. The flat organization scores higher on Utility (d = 0.42, p = 0.009) and on Writing Clarity (d = 0.34, p = 0.030); the classical prediction fails. The reports are the same length, but hierarchical reports hedge 53% more, each revision loop is associated with a 0.14-point drop in Writing Clarity, and the hierarchical Writer's first draft is indistinguishable from the flat report: the gap opens inside the revision loop. Specification accuracy is at ceiling in both organizations, and the supervisory tier costs 51.5% more tokens for no quality gain. A supervisor pays for itself when it can verify and becomes a liability when it can only opine.

8 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, plus 21 pages of supplementary material. Code: this https URL

Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); General Economics (econ.GN)

arXiv:2609.14767 [cs.MA]

(or arXiv:2609.14767v1 [cs.MA] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14767 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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