# Computational Accountability in MAS Organizations with ADOPT
## 5 Case Study: Accountability in the JaCaMo Framework
### Accountability Issues and Their Reasons
Now, let us suppose that [PERSON] decides to have an air conditioning system installed, a thing he had initially not thought of for this house. Suppose also that he wants to exploit the contracted companies to achieve this purpose, which is related to the house construction, but was not discussed. Let us also suppose he decides to assign an air_conditioning_installed goal to the agent playing the plumber role. [PERSON]'s exploitive plan would work because when an agent adopts a role in a group, that agent has no information about the tasks that could be assigned to it. The bh_scheme SchemeBoard artifact could even not have been created yet. In fact, tasks could be created independently of roles, and only subsequently associated with them. In the example, however, the companyA agent, playing the plumber role reasonably will not have a plan to achieve the air_conditioning_installed goal (indeed, it has no such plan). Thus, when the corresponding obligation is created, this will not be fulfilled. Given the above scenario, who could we consider accountable for the failure of the organizational goal air_conditioning_installed? Figure 3: Interaction between the companyA agent and the organization in the _building-a-house_ example. * Should the agent playing the plumber role be held accountable? The agent violated its obligation but it could not have reasonably anticipated the goal's introduction, which effectively made achievement impossible. * Should [PERSON] be held accountable since he introduced an unachievable goal, however licit? * Perhaps the system itself ought to bear the brunt of accountability since it permits such kind of behavior? The system, however, does not know agent capabilities. The inability to attribute accountability stems from the lack of adherence to Principles 4 and 5. Goal assignment is, in fact, performed through schemes, which can even be dynamically created and associated with an existing group. Moreover, the very independence between roles and goals violates Principle 4: When enacting a role in JaCaMo, agents do not have a say on the kind of goals they could be assigned. For this reason they cannot be held accountable later for some organizational goal they have not achieved. The problem, here, is that JaCaMo's organizational infrastructure agents do not have the possibility to discuss with the organization about the acceptability of organizational goals, which is, instead, encoded in the goal-agreement phase of the ADOPT protocol. In particular, it is impossible for agents to put before the organization the provisions needed to achieve a given organizational goal. This contradicts Principle 5. Another critical issue concerns the powers the agents gain by taking part in an organization. Following JaCaMo's conceptual meta-model, the only ways for an agent to affect the organizational state are either to enter into a group, or to change the state of an organizational goal, for example, by achieving it. In order to join a group, an agent must have access to the GroupBoard artifact which manages that group--indeed, the adoptRole operation is provided by that artifact. Similarly, to set an organizational goal as achieved, the agent must have access to the SchemeBoard artifact, which manages the execution of the scheme to which the goal belongs. From an accountability standpoint, then, the role adoption does not end when a given agent enters into a group, but only when a scheme is associated with the group and, consequently, the agent gains access to it. However, should a new scheme be added to the group, the agents inside the group would also receive new powers (i.e., the powers to change the states of the goals in the new scheme). This clearly contradicts Principle 2, which requires a declaration of awareness of the powers, associated with a role, that should be done by each of its players. This awareness is, instead, guaranteed by the role-adoption phase of the ADOPT accountability protocol.