Modelling trust, honour and reliability in business relationships

Successful negotiators prepare by determining their position along five dimensions: legitimacy, options, goals, independence, and commitment. We model business relationships in terms of these dimensions and two primitive concepts: intimacy (degree of closeness) and balance (degree of fairness). The intimacy is a pair of matrices that evaluate both an agent´s contribution to the relationship and its opponent´s contribution each from an information view and from a utilitarian view across the five dimensions. The balance is the difference between these matrices. A relationship strategy maintains a target intimacy for each relationship that an agent would like the relationship to move towards in future. The negotiation strategy maintains a set of options that are in-line with the current intimacy level, and then tactics wrap the options in argumentation with the aim of attaining a successful deal and manipulating the successive negotiation balances towards the target intimacy.