Modeling the problem of many hands in organisations

摘要

In this paper we provide a formalism to reason about the problem of many hands in organisations. This is a problem that arises whenever the organisation is responsible for some undesirable outcome but none of its members can be held responsible for the outcome. The formalism proposed here is a logic that extends the Coalition Epistemic Dynamic Logic by adding a notion of group knowledge and also organisational structures to its semantics. An organisational structure is a set of agents and some relations between them. It defines the power and coordination links between agents, which defines how agents delegate tasks and communicate. We give formal definitions for individual and collective responsibility, as well as for the problem of the many hands.