Knowledge and Blameworthiness
This work addresses a foundational issue in formal logic and game theory for modeling responsibility in multi-agent systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing principles like the principle of alternative possibilities.
The paper tackles the problem of defining blameworthiness in strategic games with imperfect information by arguing that agents must not only have a strategy to prevent an outcome but also know they have it and what it is, resulting in a sound and complete bimodal logic to describe this interplay.
Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition should have had a strategy to prevent it. In this article we argue that in the settings with imperfect information, not only should the coalition have had a strategy, but it also should have known that it had a strategy, and it should have known what the strategy was. The main technical result of the article is a sound and complete bimodal logic that describes the interplay between knowledge and blameworthiness in strategic games with imperfect information.