2021/05/19 by Baier, Christel, Funke, Florian, Majumdar, Rupak · 3 citations
#Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2105.09129
When designing or analyzing multi-agent systems, a fundamental problem is responsibility ascription: to specify which agents are responsible for the joint outcome of their behaviors and to which extent. We model strategic multi-agent interaction as an extensive form game of imperfect information and define notions of forward (prospective) and backward (retrospective) responsibility. Forward responsibility identifies the responsibility of a group of agents for an outcome along all possible plays, whereas backward responsibility identifies the responsibility along a given play. We further distinguish between strategic and causal backward responsibility, where the former captures the epistemic knowledge of players along a play, while the latter formalizes which players -- possibly unknowingly -- caused the outcome. A formal connection between forward and backward notions is established in the case of perfect recall. We further ascribe quantitative responsibility through cooperative game theory. We show through a number of examples that our approach encompasses several prior formal accounts of responsibility attribution.