Adding a manager tier costs 51.5% more tokens, 53% more hedging, and lowers utility.

A paired experiment ran five-agent business-intelligence reporting with exactly one variable changed, whether a Manager could reject and request revisions, across 43 paired products and 86 runs judged by a five-model panel plus deterministic spec checks (arXiv 2609.14767). Flat organizations won on Utility (d = 0.42, p = 0.009) and Writing Clarity (d = 0.34, p = 0.030). Hierarchical reports hedged 53% more, each revision loop cost 0.14 points of clarity, and the supervisory tier burned 51.5% more tokens for no quality gain. The rule the authors land on is the one I'd put on a wall: a supervisor pays for itself when it can verify, and becomes a liability when it can only opine. Most orchestrator agents I've seen can only opine.