Does Multi-Agent Collaboration Pay When Agents Serve Users? Testing Agent Scaling in Dual-Control Settings

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built from language models are deployed on the premise that collaboration beats a single-agent system (SAS), yet when it pays is unclear. The most systematic study to date gives a capability-saturation rule: coordination helps while the SAS is weak and hurts once it is strong, with the crossing near 45% single-agent accuracy. That rule was derived on autonomous benchmarks, where no user takes part. We test it where agents now work: in conversation with a user under a written policy, on $\tau^2$-bench, the dual-control benchmark. On its airline, retail and telecom domains we compare the stock SAS with a centralized MAS built from the same model for six models from three families, over about 7,950 simulated conversations, with one completion-token ledger per episode per system. The study was pre-registered with a public change log; the MAS is reported as built, with one validity bar unmet (its planner never saw the tool schemas). Under a fixed simulated user no cell shows a MAS benefit: the MAS is worse in 12 of the 13 valid cells and tied in the thirteenth, and the fitted gain is negative across the observed capability range (weighted mean -28 points, 95% CI [-44, -12]). On the two cells where the rule predicts a benefit, the MAS loses by 13 and 22 points, and without a budget ceiling it at best draws level at 5.5 times the SAS's token spend. The one gain appears on the cell nearest 45%, under a second simulator. Whether the gain declines with capability is unresolved (slope -0.41, 95% CI [-1.51, +0.68]), because model-by-domain effects dominate. The MAS does not detectably reduce wrongful database writes; it converts other failures into budget exhaustion and inaction. For agents that serve people, the SAS is the default; a multi-agent design must show compute-matched evidence from the setting itself. We release all trajectories, ledgers, prompts and code.