Diffusion of Responsibility in Collective Decision Making

The paper explores diffusion of responsibility in collective decision-making, focusing on scenarios where multiple agents share responsibility. It reveals that in two-agent decisions, diffusion can only be avoided through a "dictatorship." For more than two agents, any diffusion-free mechanism is an "elected dictatorship." The study uses bisimulation to define and prove properties of decision-making mechanisms, aiming to minimize responsibility diffusion. It discusses counterfactual responsibility, linking responsibility to alternative actions, and uses this concept to interpret "could have done otherwise." The paper also examines properties of diffusion-free mechanisms, proving that under certain assumptions, agents responsible at a node are equivalent, confirming the mechanism's canonical form.