This SpringerBrief reviews the existing market-oriented strategies for economically managing resource allocation in distributed systems. It describes three new schemes that address cost-efficiency, user incentives, and allocation fairness with regard to different scheduling contexts. The first scheme, taking the Amazon EC2(TM) market as a case of study, investigates the optimal resource rental planning models based on linear integer programming and stochastic optimization techniques. This model is useful to explore the interaction between the cloud infrastructure provider and the cloud...