Abstract As data-center energy consumption continues to rise, effificient power management is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we examine the use of a novel market mechanism for fifinding the right balance between power and performance. The market enables a separation between a ‘buyer side’ that strives to maximize performance and a ‘seller side’ that strives to minimize power and other costs. A concise and scalable description language is de- fifined for agent preferences that admits a mixedinteger program for computing optimal allocations. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness, flflexibility, practicality and scalability of the architecture