Diffusion of Responsibility in Collective Decision Making
This addresses accountability issues in multi-agent systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing mechanism design concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of diffusion of responsibility in collective decision-making, showing that with two agents, avoiding it requires a dictator, and with more agents, it necessitates an elected dictatorship.
The term "diffusion of responsibility'' refers to situations in which multiple agents share responsibility for an outcome, obscuring individual accountability. This paper examines this frequently undesirable phenomenon in the context of collective decision-making mechanisms. The work shows that if a decision is made by two agents, then the only way to avoid diffusion of responsibility is for one agent to act as a "dictator'', making the decision unilaterally. In scenarios with more than two agents, any diffusion-free mechanism is an "elected dictatorship'' where the agents elect a single agent to make a unilateral decision. The technical results are obtained by defining a bisimulation of decision-making mechanisms, proving that bisimulation preserves responsibility-related properties, and establishing the results for a smallest bisimular mechanism.