Distributed resource allocation is a very important and complex problem in emerging horizontal dynamic cloud federation (HDCF). It differs from the existing vertical supply chain federation (VSCF) models in terms of establishing federation and dynamic pricing. There is a need to develop algorithms that can capture this complexity and used to solve distributed VM allocation problem in HDCF platform. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic solution to this problem that ensures mutual benefits to the CPs in a HDCF platform. We study two resource allocation games - non cooperative and cooperative games to analyze interaction among CPs in HDCF environment. We use price-based resource allocation strategies and present both centralized and distributed algorithms to find optimal solutions which have low overhead and robust performance. Various simulations were carried out to validate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation games. The simulation results demonstrate that the cooperative scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of performance and cost effectiveness of resource. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT