Responsibility in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making: Comparing Human Judgments to Formal Models of Causal Attribution
Responsibility in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making: Comparing Human Judgments to Formal Models of Causal Attribution
Nripsuta Saxena, Stelios Triantafyllou, Goran Radanović
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Human-Centred AI. Pages 7676-7684.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/853
With the growing adoption of artificial intelligence in high-stakes decision-making domains, identifying the causes of outcomes--particularly failures--and determining who is responsible has become a critical concern. In this work, we investigate how well formal definitions of responsibility attribution, grounded in the framework of actual causality, align with human judgments of responsibility. To this end, we conduct a large-scale survey to elicit human judgments of responsibility in multi-agent sequential decision-making scenarios, using a modified version of the card game Goofspiel. We evaluate different responsibility attribution methods, assessing their alignment with human judgments about responsibility, and identifying factors that significantly shape responsibility judgments. While no single responsibility attribution method consistently aligns with human responses, our findings highlight key factors that influence human responsibility judgments, including agent-specific biases and the amount of information available to agents during decision-making.
Keywords:
Human-Centred AI: Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems
Human-Centred AI: Humans and AI
