The Honourable Negotiator: When the Relationship Is What Matters

Relationships are fundamental to all but the most impersonal forms of interaction in business. Human agents who are unsure of themselves seek honourable trading relationships. The establishment and growth of interpersonal relationships is a result of reciprocal exchange of information. This paper addresses the problem of use of information for developing and utilising relationships between negotiating agents. The presence of measurable information on the Internet underpins the philosophy of transparency in electronic business, which has an impact on the behaviour of involved agents. It takes ‘two to tango’ for conducting business in such a ‘net landscape’ where communities and cliques emerge, shape and evolve. The paper presents a formalism for electronic negotiation technology that treats relationships as a commodity. It supports relationship building, maintaining, evolving, and passing to other agents, and utilises such relationships in agent interaction. The Honourable Negotiator also takes in account information about the relationships in networks of respective agents outside the trading space.