Your valuation settings indicate your maximum willingness to pay for a specific amount of bandwidth. In the course of an auction, your agent uses this valuation information, together with the market price, to determine how much to bid and how much bandwidth to ask for, in response to changing market conditions.
For a description of the methods of valuation, see Merkato User Reference for Buyers, “Valuation Overview.”
Create your valuation by filling in the fields. The fields are different depending on which valuation method you select.
Select the Current Valuation radio button.
Click Apply. (The Apply button changes from yellow to blue when a parameter is changed, and back to yellow when the change takes effect.)
Changes to valuations only affect bidding if that particular valuation is active¾indicated by the radio button at the top of the window and the green arrow in the pull-down menu list. If a valuation is not active, the changes are stored until you active that valuation.
That you get no allocation (or do not bid) does not necessarily mean that your traffic has no bandwidth available to it. The data streams of agents that do not bid (or do not win any allocation) are generally funneled through a single, shared amount of permanently allocated bandwidth. Ask your Merkato administrator how much bandwidth is allocated to this “best effort queue” so that you can make the best decision of when to stop bidding on the low end (see budget-with-limits valuation).