In this paper, we analyze the relative merits of uniform versus priority dropping for the transmission of layered video. We rst present our original intuitions about these two approaches, and then investigate the issue more thoroughly through simulations and analysis in which we explicitly model the performance of layered video applications. We compare both their performance characteristics and incentive properties, and nd that the performance bene t of priority dropping is smaller than we expected, while uniform dropping has worse incentive properties than we previously believed.