Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making

TL;DR

This paper investigates the responsibility gap in collective decision-making, demonstrating that in perfect information settings, only elected dictatorships eliminate the gap, and characterizing mechanisms in imperfect settings.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of elected dictatorship and characterizes when the responsibility gap is minimized or eliminated in different informational settings.

Findings

In perfect information, elected dictatorships have no responsibility gap.

In imperfect information, gap-free mechanisms are strictly between two types of elected dictatorships.

The paper provides theoretical proofs for these characterizations.

Abstract

The responsibility gap is a set of outcomes of a collective decision-making mechanism in which no single agent is individually responsible. In general, when designing a decision-making process, it is desirable to minimise the gap. The paper proposes a concept of an elected dictatorship. It shows that, in a perfect information setting, the gap is empty if and only if the mechanism is an elected dictatorship. It also proves that in an imperfect information setting, the class of gap-free mechanisms is positioned strictly between two variations of the class of elected dictatorships.