Strategic Responsibility Under Imperfect Information

Abstract

A central issue in the specification and verification of autonomous agents and multiagent systems is the ascription of responsibility to individual agents and groups of agents. When designing a (multi)agent system, we must specify which agents or groups of agents are responsible for bringing about a particular state of affairs. Similarly, when verifying a multiagent system, we may wish to determine the responsibility of agents or groups of agents for a particular state of affairs, and the contribution of each agent to bringing about that state of affairs. In this paper, we discuss several aspects of responsibility, including strategic ability of agents, their epistemic properties, and their relationship to the evolution of the system behavior. We introduce a formal framework for reasoning about the responsibility of individual agents and agent groups in terms of the agents' strategies and epistemic properties, and state some properties of the framework.