# Blameworthiness in Multi-Agent Settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.04102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04102/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Reasoning about Causality in Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02324/) (2023)
- [On Blame Attribution for Accountable Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11927/) (2021)
- [Actual Causality and Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00302/) (2022)
- [Counterfactual Effect Decomposition in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12539/) (2024)
- [Towards Computationally Efficient Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable MDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12676/) (2023)
- [Causal Responsibility Attribution for Human-AI Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03275/) (2024)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Causal Responsibility Attribution in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13077/) (2026)
- [Measuring Responsibility in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00887/) (2024)
- [Causal Kripke Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05631/) (2023)
- [The Benefits of Power Regularization in Cooperative Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11240/) (2024)
- [AUDITA: certified auditing and causal attribution of adverse outcomes in autonomous multi-agent systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22160/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We provide a formal definition of blameworthiness in settings where multiple agents can collaborate to avoid a negative outcome. We first provide a method for ascribing blameworthiness to groups relative to an epistemic state (a distribution over causal models that describe how the outcome might arise). We then show how we can go from an ascription of blameworthiness for groups to an ascription of blameworthiness for individuals using a standard notion from cooperative game theory, the Shapley value. We believe that getting a good notion of blameworthiness in a group setting will be critical for designing autonomous agents that behave in a moral manner.