The Auction Table gives you a quantitative, real-time view of the auction in progress.
The columns in the auction table are as follows:
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ID |
The ID of the bidder. A bidder agent The program that interacts with the rest of Merkato on behalf of buyers and sellers. Buyers can acquire bandwidth by configuring their agents to offer the price they are willing to pay for a range of available quantity, or use their agent to request a quote for a fixed-price bandwidth reservation. Sellers configure their agents with a quantity of bandwidth for sale and a minimum price they are willing to accept for that quantity. receives a new ID whenever it is uploaded to or downloaded from the garage A server from which buyer and seller agents can bid when they are not actively bidding on a user's PC desktop. The garage is generally installed on the Merkato server, providing maximum performance and reliability. . |
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Quantity |
The quantity requested in the last bid placed (note that this may be split into multiple rows, as explained below). |
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Price |
The price (unit price) requested in the last bid placed. |
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Rate |
The rate represented by the bid. This is the quantity times the price. It is the maximum cost represented by that bid, but not necessarily the price that will be paid by the bidder. |
The rows of Auction table are as follows:
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Your agent’s last bid is shown in red. The last bids of all other agents are shown in black (in the blue shaded area) or in yellow (in the black area). |
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Any bidders, including your agent, that receive an allocation An amount of bandwidth available for your use. Depending on the type of service being offered through Merkato, this can represent the maximum bandwidth available to you or a minimum guarantee of bandwidth available to you. of bandwidth The amount of data transmitted or received per unit of time. When we refer to acquiring or selling bandwidth, we mean the amount of information that can be sent over a connection at one time, at the allowed speed, without packet loss or excessive delay. Bandwidth is measured in bits-per-second. are shown in the blue shaded area. Any bidder who does not receive an allocation is shown in the black area. Bidders that receive only a portion of an allocation are shown in both the blue and black areas, with their quantities split accordingly. |
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Bidders currently unsuccessful in the auction round are shown in the black area. The price offered by unsuccessful bidders forms the basis for the actual cost paid by your agent if it receives an allocation. (See Merkato Auction Mechanism: The Progressive Second Price Auction.) If you are currently winning an auction round, the rates shown in the yellow-shaded area are the rates offered by bidders whose combined rate offers your offer has exceeded. These bidders are thus pushed out by your agent’s bid. |
The rate offered by the highest unsuccessful bidder is the basis of your cost. The magenta number (in the yellow cell) at the bottom of the table is a calculation of the rate you would pay should the auction end immediately. It is based on the rate offered by the highest bidders currently in the black area. (To figure your corresponding unit price, divide this number by the amount of bandwidth indicated for your agent in the blue shaded area.)
The columns of the Auction table may be resized (by clicking and dragging column boundaries in the header) or reordered (by clicking and dragging the column headers themselves).