The roll call interpretation of the Shapley value

Abstract

The Shapley value is commonly illustrated by roll call votes in which players support or reject a proposal in sequence. If all sequences are equiprobable, a voter’s Shapley value can be interpreted as the probability of being pivotal, i.e., to bring about the required majority or to make this impossible for others. We characterize the joint probability distributions over cooperation patterns that permit this roll call interpretation: individual votes may be interdependent but must be exchangeable.