In this paper we compare the costs and benefits of market-based and thresholdbased approaches to task allocation in real world conditions, where information and communication may be limited or inaccurate. We have performed extensive comparative experiments in an event-handling domain. Our results indicate that when information is accurate, market-based approaches are more efficient; when it is not, threshold-based approaches offer the same quality of allocation at a fraction of the expense. Additionally, both approaches are robust to low communication and task perception ranges in our experimental domain.