Paper 4 · Question 1

A: Workflow termination on a single subagent failure wastes partial results from the web search and industry reports subagents that may have completed successfully. The coordinator should proceed with available results and annotate the coverage gap.

B: 403 Forbidden is a permission error, not a transient error. Retrying will not resolve it — the subagent lacks the required access credentials. The correct response is to propagate the error with its type so the coordinator knows the failure is not retryable.

C: Silent suppression — returning empty results marked as success — is the worst error propagation anti-pattern. The coordinator believes the academic search succeeded and found nothing, so it produces a report without academic sources and without noting the coverage gap. The subagent should have returned structured error context with the failure type, what was attempted, and potential alternatives.

D: Requiring non-empty results from all subagents would cause the workflow to fail when a subagent legitimately finds no matching data. The issue is that the error was suppressed, not that the coordinator failed to validate result volume.