# Causality, Responsibility and Blame in Team Plans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Actual Causality and Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00302/) (2022)
- [Anticipating Responsibility in Multiagent Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16685/) (2023)
- [Automated Discovery of Functional Actual Causes in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10883/) (2024)
- [Towards Computationally Efficient Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable MDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12676/) (2023)
- [Moral reinforcement learning using actual causation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08192/) (2022)
- [Responsibility-aware Strategic Reasoning in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00146/) (2024)
- [Measuring Responsibility in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00887/) (2024)
- [The Benefits of Power Regularization in Cooperative Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11240/) (2024)
- [Responsibility in a Multi-Value Strategic Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17229/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many objectives can be achieved (or may be achieved more effectively) only by a group of agents executing a team plan. If a team plan fails, it is often of interest to determine what caused the failure, the degree of responsibility of each agent for the failure, and the degree of blame attached to each agent. We show how team plans can be represented in terms of structural equations, and then apply the definitions of causality introduced by Halpern [2015] and degree of responsibility and blame introduced by Chockler and Halpern [2004] to determine the agent(s) who caused the failure and what their degree of responsibility/blame is. We also prove new results on the complexity of computing causality and degree of responsibility and blame, showing that they can be determined in polynomial time for many team plans of interest.