{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"A Game-Theoretic Account of Responsibility Allocation","authors":[{"name":"Christel Baier","slug":"christel-baier","given":"Christel","family":"Baier","affiliation":""},{"name":"Florian Funke","slug":"florian-funke","given":"Florian","family":"Funke","affiliation":""},{"name":"Rupak Majumdar","slug":"rupak-majumdar","given":"Rupak","family":"Majumdar","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"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.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2021/244","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/244","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0244.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/244.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/bibtex/244","volume":{"slug":"2021","title":"Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2021","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/","year":2021,"location":"Montreal","dates":"19-27 August 2021","editors":"Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou","isbn":"978-0-9992411-9-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2021"},"section":"Knowledge Representation and Reasoning","track":"Main Track","number":244,"pages":{"first":1773,"last":1779},"keywords":["Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}