The Collaboration Tax: How Much LLM Multi-Agent Systems Pay to Coordinate
Multi-agent systems built from large language models are deployed widely, yet how much performance is lost when two LLMs must coordinate rather than act alone remains unclear. We formulate the collaboration tax as the team-decentralisation loss of a two-player cooperative game with private information, with two propositions characterising its sign and its equivalence to a max-superadditivity violation. We operationalise this definition on 32 solo-tractable tasks grouped by source of grounding friction and measure it on 11 models from 7 providers. The tax is structured along two no-exception axes: a category ordering across every model and a monotonic decrease with capability. The proximat...
| Authors | Weixiang Sun, Zehong Wang, Hong Huang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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