Causal, Strategic, and Combined Responsibility Attribution in Situation Calculus Concurrent Game Structures

Read full text
Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, MohammadHossein Karimian, Shakil M. Khan, Yves Lespérance
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Responsibility is a central concept in accountable decision making for multiagent systems. As modern AI systems grow in complexity and autonomy, there is a growing demand for them to address issues in AI ethics, prompting researchers to formalize responsibility from diverse perspectives, including strategic responsibility. However, causal responsibility, i.e. responsibility due to actual causal contribution, has received much less attention. In this paper, we study variants of responsibility attribution from both strategic and causal perspectives within a synchronous game-theoretic logic framework that allows concurrent moves by multiple agents. Our formalization is based on Situation Calculus Synchronous Game Structures (SCSGS). We show that by combining these perspectives, one can obtain novel forms of responsibility attribution that are grounded on actual causation. While doing this, we propose an account of actual causation in SCSGSs. We prove that our formalization handles the issues associated with preemption and over-determination well. We also study some key properties of responsibility and demonstrate that causal, strategic, and combined notions of responsibility are extensionally distinct.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Logic Reasoning and Knowledge Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation Ethics and Social Impacts of AI

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN