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254 Socially Intelligent Agents2.2 Selection of negotiating partnersAgents could have any of a wide variety of strategies for the identificationof issues about which to negotiate and for the selection of negotiating partners.At one extreme, an agent could identify an issue and then negotiate with everypossible (or known) agent concerning that issue. At the other extreme, agentscan select other agents with which to negotiate and determine the issues incollaboration with the selected agents. The strategy to be modelled - whetherone of these extreme cases or some combination or set of parallel strategies -should depend on observation and the evidence of domain expertise.In the model reported here, the negotiating strategy was driven by the selectionof agents as negotiating partners. The criteria for selecting an agent withwhich to negotiation were based on trustworthiness, reliability, similarity, helpfulness,acquaintanceship, untrustworthiness, unreliability, unhelpfulness. Oneagent identifies another as reliable if the other agent responds affirmatively to asuggestion that the two agents negotiate. An agent will identify another as trustworthyif its public negotiating position reflects previous agreements betweenthe two agents. An agent is helpful if it suggests to two or more other agentsthat they might usefully negotiate with one another and agreement among thoseagents is realised. An agent will identify another as similar if, among all ofthe negotiating positions known to the agent, the other agent shares the largestnumber of position values. One agent can know another either because of anapproach at random or because the other agent has made contact by suggestinga negotiation.Each agent in the model has rules for attaching endorsements - tokens reflectingthe selection or aversion criteria - to other agents. The ranking of theimportance of endorsements is, in the first instance, random except that oppositeendorsements (helpful and unhelpful, trustworthy and untrustworthy, reliableand unreliable) have rankings of the same magnitude and opposite sign. Sothat if trustworthy is the most important positive endorsement, untrustworthywill be the most important negative endorsement. Each agent will have its owninitial ranking of positive (and therefore negative) endorsements. Each agentwill select the best endorsed agent it knows as a negotiating partner at eachstage.Over the course of a negotiation process, each agent will continue to learnabout other agents - a process represented by the ongoing attachment of endorsements.Each agent also learns which are the most important criteria touse in selecting negotiating partners. If the use of a particular set of rankingsof criteria leads to agreement with a selected agent or group of agents, thereis no reason to change the relative importance of the different criteria. If noagreement is reached, then there will be less confidence in the current ranking -