Causes and Strategies in Multiagent Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework combining causality and multi-agent systems using causal concurrent game structures, enabling analysis of how agents' strategic decisions influence causal outcomes.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to model multi-agent systems with causality, integrating structural causal models with game-theoretic structures for strategic analysis.

Findings

Framework effectively models causal effects in multi-agent settings

Enables reasoning about strategic interventions and their impacts

Formal relations established between causal models and game structures

Abstract

Causality plays an important role in daily processes, human reasoning, and artificial intelligence. There has however not been much research on causality in multi-agent strategic settings. In this work, we introduce a systematic way to build a multi-agent system model, represented as a concurrent game structure, for a given structural causal model. In the obtained so-called causal concurrent game structure, transitions correspond to interventions on agent variables of the given causal model. The Halpern and Pearl framework of causality is used to determine the effects of a certain value for an agent variable on other variables. The causal concurrent game structure allows us to analyse and reason about causal effects of agents' strategic decisions. We formally investigate the relation between causal concurrent game structures and the original structural causal models.