Examining Agents' Bias Amplification versus Suppression in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed to support various tasks where agents interact to achieve individual and collective objectives. Although these systems can enhance task performance and decision-making, fairness preservation through bias reduction remains challenging. This study examines how agent-level biases shift and impact system-wide fairness. We use prompts to expose individual agents to group-favoring bias, then assess downstream impacts at the system level. To quantify the impact, we propose Favor Bias Strength (FBS), a zero-centered metric that decomposes bias alteration between favored-group uplift and disfavored-group suppression. Using multiple agent designs, benchmarks, and up-to-date large language models, we show that agents endowed with bias can substantially affect system-wide fairness. Interestingly, when agents are exposed to bias uniformly, the system-wide bias elevates, even exceeding the additive sum of the individual agents' biases. The empirical evidence underscores the criticality of fairness in multi-agent systems, which warrants further analyses and empirical tests.