Peer Oversight in Collective Decision Making

This article introduces peer k-oversight, a property of sequential collective decision mechanisms requiring at least k agents to be responsible for every harmful outcome. It is shown that whenever k-oversight can be achieved by redistributing control over the decisions in a mechanism, it can be achieved using just k agents. A polynomial-time algorithm is also presented that determines whether such a redistribution exists and, when it does, constructs one. These results establish peer oversight as a tractable design principle for multiagent decision-making systems.