EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules

Marie Obidzinski and Yves Oytana
Additional contact information
Yves Oytana: Université de Franche-Comté, CRESE, Besançon, France

No 24-06, Working Papers AFED from Association Francaise d'Economie du Droit (AFED)

Abstract: We characterize the socially optimal liability sharing rule in a situation where a manufacturer develops an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is then used by a human operator (or user). First, the manufacturer invests to increase the autonomy of the AI (i.e., the set of situations that the AI can handle without human intervention) and sets a selling price. The user then decides whether or not to buy the AI. Since the autonomy of the AI remains limited, the human operator must sometimes intervene even when the AI is in use. Our main assumptions relate to behavioral inattention. Behavioral inattention reduces the effectiveness of user intervention and increases the expected harm. Only some users are aware of their own attentional limits. Under the assumption that AI outperforms users, we show that policymakers may face a tradeoff when choosing how to allocate liability between the manufacturer and the user. Indeed, the manufacturer may underinvest in the autonomy of the AI. If this is the case, the policymaker can incentivize the latter to invest more by increasing his share of liability. On the other hand, increasing the liability of the manufacturer may come at the cost of slowing down the diffusion of AI technology.

Keywords: K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-gth, nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-law and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://afed.ovh/RePEc/afd/wpaper/AFED-WP-24-06.pdf First version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules (2024)
Working Paper: Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Artificial intelligence, inattention and liability rules (2024) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:afd:wpaper:2406

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers AFED from Association Francaise d'Economie du Droit (AFED) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AFED ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:afd:wpaper:2406