One disadvantage of the Budget valuation is that it makes the agent continue attempting to obtain as much bandwidth 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 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.