Peer Oversight in Collective Decision Making
Computer Science and Game TheoryArtificial IntelligenceMultiagent Systems
Summary
The authors introduce a concept called peer k-oversight, which means at least k people must be responsible for any bad decision in a group. They show that if it's possible to rearrange who makes decisions to achieve this, then it can be done using just k people. They also provide a fast algorithm to check if this rearrangement is possible and to create it when it is. This makes peer oversight a useful and manageable idea for designing systems where many agents make decisions together.
Authors
Sarah Mohsen, Pavel Naumov
Abstract
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.