Fair decomposition of group obligations

Abstract

Abstract We consider the problem of decomposing a group norm into a set of individual obligations for the agents comprising the group, such that if the individual obligations are fulfilled, the group obligation is fulfilled. Such an assignment of tasks to agents is often subject to additional social or organizational norms that specify permissible ways in which tasks can be assigned. An important role of social norms is that they can be used to impose ‘fairness constraints’, which seek to distribute individual responsibility for discharging the group norm in a ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’ way. We propose a simple language for this kind of fairness constraints and analyse the problem of computing a fair decomposition of a group obligation, both for non-repeating and for repeating group obligations.