Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making

Naumov, Pavel; Tao, Jia

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2025/513

Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 4606-4614.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/513

Keywords

Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Mechanism design
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Reasoning about actions
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Reasoning about knowledge and belief

Abstract

The responsibility gap is a set of outcomes of a collective decision-making mechanism in which no single agent is individually responsible. In general, when designing a decision-making process, it is desirable to minimise the gap.

The paper studies the class of mechanisms for which the gap is empty and proposes a concept of an elected dictatorship. It shows that, in a perfect information setting, the gap is empty if and only if the mechanism is an elected dictatorship. It also proves that in an imperfect information setting, the class of gap-free mechanisms is positioned strictly between two variations of the class of elected dictatorships.

Pavel Naumov, and Jia Tao. 2025. Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 4606–4614. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/513

@inproceedings{ijcai2025p513,
  title     = {Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making},
  author    = {Naumov, Pavel and Tao, Jia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-25}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {James Kwok},
  pages     = {4606--4614},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Main Track},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2025/513},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/513},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making
AU  - Naumov, Pavel
AU  - Tao, Jia
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2025
SP  - 4606
EP  - 4614
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2025/513
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/513
ER  -