Some sellers may want to create a more complex floor price The lowest price the seller will accept for bandwidth. The seller can establish the floor price through the Seller agent. strategy. For example, you may want to release additional 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. to the marketplace at a certain price point. You can do this by increasing the amount of bandwidth available in the marketplace and simultaneously using your own Buyer 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. to bid for that same amount of bandwidth at the desired price point. To obtain that additional bandwidth, a real buyer would have to out-bid this “buy-back agent.” You can duplicate this same method to release bandwidth at various price points with multiple buy-back agents. You can also create a buy-back agent that uses a more complex bidding strategy¾one that gradually releases bandwidth to the marketplace as prices rise.
We recommend that you reveal your buy-back agents to your legitimate buyers so that they can factor this behavior into their bidding strategy. Static buy-back agents are “self revealing,”¾easy to interpret by buyers using the Auction Table display. If you intend to change settings of your buy-back agents often, your buyers should understand your intentions. You should teach them to interpret the buy-back agent’s behavior on the Auction table.