In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as markets, or planning.
[1] In economics, the field of public finance deals with three broad areas: macroeconomic stabilization, the distribution of income and wealth, and the allocation of resources.
Much of the study of the allocation of resources is devoted to finding the conditions under which particular mechanisms of resource allocation lead to Pareto efficient outcomes, in which no party's situation can be improved without hurting that of another party.
For example, channel allocation in wireless communication may be decided by a base transceiver station using an appropriate algorithm.
In one paper on CPU time slice allocation[6] an auction algorithm is compared to proportional share scheduling.