Attribution of collective causal responsibility to individual actors in a stochastic system

Abstract

We propose an attribution of collective causal responsibility in a stochastic nonlinear system to individual actors. To this end, we take an existing measure of collective causal responsibility from Vallentyne (2008) and Baumgartner (2020), and adopt Shapley's (1953) fundamental concept of how to divide a collective effect into individual marginal contributions. Our generic setting is a system with a potential regime shift, where actions affect the regime-shift probability. This paper closes a gap in the literature on responsibility attribution: our concept has cardinal properties and allows for multiple actors with simultaneous actions. This is relevant for implementing efficient incentive schemes and liability for managers of stochastic systems.