Responsible Mechanism Design

ESSLLI-26 course

Collective decision-making processes have a common pitfall: when things go awry, it is usually hard to identify a single person who should be blamed for the harmful outcome of a collective decision. Could collective decision-making processes be designed to avoid this? This question is at the core of responsible mechanism design—a new interdisciplinary area of research on the border of philosophy, game theory, logic, and artificial intelligence to be introduced in this course. We will discuss multiple formal definitions of responsibility and individual accountability, study whether the individual accountability requirement is consistent with shared authority, and cover design techniques for enforcing various forms of individual accountability for collective decisions.