Autonomous vehicles (AV) hold great potential to increase road safety, reduce traffic congestion, and improve mobility systems. However, the deployment of AVs introduces new liability challenges when they are involved in car accidents. A new legal framework should be developed to tackle such a challenge. This paper proposes a legal framework, incorporating liability rules to rear-end crashes in mixed-traffic platoons with AVs and human-propelled vehicles (HV). We leverage a matrix game approach to understand interactions among players whose utility captures crash loss for drivers according to liability rules. We investigate how liability rules may impact the game equilibrium between vehicles and whether human drivers’ moral hazards arise if liability is not designed properly. We find that compared to the no-fault liability rule, contributory and comparative rules make road users have incentives to execute a smaller reaction time to improve road safety. There exists moral hazards for human drivers when risk-averse AV players are in the car platoon.
This content will become publicly available on September 11, 2025
Towards Computational Foreseeability
This paper addresses the challenges of computational accountability in autonomous systems, particularly in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), where safety and efficiency often conflict. We begin by examining current approaches such as cost minimization, reward maximization, human-centered approaches, and ethical frameworks, noting their limitations addressing these challenges. Foreseeability is a central concept in tort law that limits the accountability and legal liability of an actor to a reasonable scope. Yet, current data-driven methods to determine foreseeability are rigid, ignore uncertainty, and depend on simulation data. In this work, we advocate for a new computational approach to establish foreseeability of autonomous systems based on the legal “BPL” formula. We provide open research challenges, using fully autonomous vehicles as a motivating example, and call for researchers to help autonomous systems make accountable decisions in safety-critical scenarios.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2131531
- PAR ID:
- 10544017
- Publisher / Repository:
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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