System energy consumption is a multi-player game

Our key insight is that per-process energy accounting can be formulated as a problem that has been extensively studied in game theory: when multiple players participate in a game and the game produces a surplus, how to divide the surplus among the players? Shapley value is a well-known single value solution to this problem. For any coalition of players S ⊆ N = {1, 2, ... , n}, we denote v(S) as the game surplus if played by coalition S. Shapley value defines the only way to distribute the the grand coalition surplus v(N) among the n players that satisfies four simple axioms: Efficiency, Symmetry, Dummy, and Additivity.