---
title: "A Game-Theoretic Account of Responsibility Allocation"
authors:
  - "Christel Baier"
  - "Florian Funke"
  - "Rupak Majumdar"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2021/244"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/244"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0244.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2021
pages: "1773-1779"
track: "Main Track"
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"
---

# A Game-Theoretic Account of Responsibility Allocation

Christel Baier, Florian Funke, Rupak Majumdar

*Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1773-1779. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2021/244](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/244)

## 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.