Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making
This addresses a theoretical problem in mechanism design for AI and social choice, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts.
The paper tackles the responsibility gap in collective decision-making, proving that in perfect information settings, the gap is empty only for elected dictatorships, and in imperfect settings, gap-free mechanisms lie between variations of elected dictatorships.
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 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.