Agree to Disagree: Subjective Fairness in Privacy-Restricted Decentralised Conflict Resolution

TL;DR

This paper explores how privacy constraints in decentralized systems lead to subjective fairness issues, proposing a new interaction framework and formalism to balance privacy and fairness through dialogue-based conflict resolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel privacy-aware, explainable conflict resolution architecture and formalizes the relationship between privacy and fairness in decentralized multi-agent systems.

Findings

Trade-off between privacy, objective fairness, and subjective fairness demonstrated.

Better strategies can mitigate privacy-related fairness issues.

Empirical analysis confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Fairness is commonly seen as a property of the global outcome of a system and assumes centralisation and complete knowledge. However, in real decentralised applications, agents only have partial observation capabilities. Under limited information, agents rely on communication to divulge some of their private (and unobservable) information to others. When an agent deliberates to resolve conflicts, limited knowledge may cause its perspective of a correct outcome to differ from the actual outcome of the conflict resolution. This is subjective unfairness. To enable decentralised, fairness-aware conflict resolution under privacy constraints, we have two contributions: (1) a novel interaction approach and (2) a formalism of the relationship between privacy and fairness. Our proposed interaction approach is an architecture for privacy-aware explainable conflict resolution where agents engage in a dialogue of hypotheses and facts. To measure the privacy-fairness relationship, we define subjective and objective fairness on both the local and global scope and formalise the impact of partial observability due to privacy in these different notions of fairness. We first study our proposed architecture and the privacy-fairness relationship in the abstract, testing different argumentation strategies on a large number of randomised cultures. We empirically demonstrate the trade-off between privacy, objective fairness, and subjective fairness and show that better strategies can mitigate the effects of privacy in distributed systems. In addition to this analysis across a broad set of randomised abstract cultures, we analyse a case study for a specific scenario: we instantiate our architecture in a multi-agent simulation of prioritised rule-aware collision avoidance with limited information disclosure.