A more complex scenario was considered in some detail at Agorics
in bidding for scarce video bandwidth for conferences.
By hypotheses the bandwidth cost was comparable with the
salaries of the people using the bandwidth.
With compression, the bandwidth demand would also fluctuate.
The bandwidth price would fluctuate with demands of others.
We proposed a user agent with a default but modifiable policy.
Normally the user at the sink of the video stream would control and
pay for the resulting quality of the image coming toward him.
Normally the default profile would automatically and dynamically
control tradeoffs in frame-rate, color fidelity, and resolution, which
was already state of the art.
Occasionally, however, the viewer needed to see something better
and could act to purchase a better view.
Such acts might request better resolution or frame rate etc.
The cost of such acts was made known to the user.
All this hair was to allocate a scarce resource to its best use.
It was partly a reaction to an imagined event where
someone leaves a video channel open all weekend which starves
an accounting application which causes salary checks to be late.
Fears such as these were preventing some large institutions from
integrating their various data networks.
<p>
“Too cheap to meter” doesn’t always work.
More background and gory details <a href=ImpactI.html>here</a>.
<hr>That my electric lights are metered means only that I make the effort to turn them off if I am gone for a week.