One disadvantage of the Budget valuation The value a buyer or seller places on bandwidth. Setting a valuation is part of setting a purchasing strategy. Valuation settings within a buyer agent let buyers specify the amount they are willing to pay for varying amounts of bandwidth. This information is used by the agent to respond to changing market conditions during a Merkato progressive second price auction. is that it makes the 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. continue attempting to obtain as much 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. as it can, for the budgeted amount, as market prices rise. This means that in extreme circumstances, a bidder could pay his entire budget for a very small amount of bandwidth. Under the Merkato system, bidders who receive no 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. during a round have their traffic routed through a shared, fixed-bandwidth data path. Ask your Merkato administrator for the size of this “best-effort queue” and use that information to determine the level of bandwidth for which you would rather be in the shared data path “for free” rather than pay your budget for an allocation of a similar amount. Be conservative, though. The throughput and latency of your data stream when you are in the “best effort queue” depends heavily on how many other bidders are there and how much data they are transferring at the same time.