Currently in the cloud market resources are mainly allocated according to the fixed-price, direct selling model. Market principles such as the supply-demand rate are not taken into consideration by cloud providers. In the literature several marketbased resource allocation models and algorithms have been proposed, showing that dynamic pricing models might result more convenient for both the providers and the consumers of cloud resources. In this paper, we discuss about the use of alternative auction-based mechanisms to sell the “residual” computing capacity, i.e., the capacity which the provider is not able to allocate through direct-selling. The design of a procurement market for computing resources is proposed: in such a market we devised an adaptive bidding strategy that suggests to the provider the right actions useful to attain its business objective. The resource overbooking mechanism is also proposed to overcome the problem of resource underutilization. A software simulator was implemented with the aim of testing and validating the proposed mechanisms. Results show that, by fine-tuning their own strategy, providers manage to pursue specific objectives.