---
title: "Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making"
authors:
  - "Pavel Naumov"
  - "Jia Tao"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2025/513"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2025/513"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2025/0513.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2025
pages: "4606-4614"
track: "Main Track"
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"
---

# Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making

Pavel Naumov, Jia Tao

*Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 4606-4614. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2025/513](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/513)

## 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.