What do you think a market is, if not negotiations about prices?
The simplest markets are commodity markets: there are a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, a large quantity of goods which are all substitutable for each other -- who cares whether you buy this bushel of winter wheat vs that other one? -- and everyone has perfect communication with each other.
Like perfectly spherical cows, this doesn't happen exactly in the real world, but is close enough to some scenarios to be useful.
Here are factors which affect the price in the market and therefore require negotiation:
(I left out governments, taxes, and all sorts of illegal things that won't count as "transparent", but exist anyway.)
And that's just to buy grain, a commodity so basic that the Babylonians invented accounting and writing to deal with it.
Yes, you need to negotiate. Sometimes you can just say: "the price you quoted is sufficiently low that I can accept it immediately", but that's merely the fastest negotiation.
Not necessarily. You just need a trustworthy reputation system to go with everything else. Some things will cost more, some less, more reputation costs more, too. Relevant, in demand experience costs more.
What do you think a market is, if not negotiations about prices?
The simplest markets are commodity markets: there are a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, a large quantity of goods which are all substitutable for each other -- who cares whether you buy this bushel of winter wheat vs that other one? -- and everyone has perfect communication with each other.
Like perfectly spherical cows, this doesn't happen exactly in the real world, but is close enough to some scenarios to be useful.
Here are factors which affect the price in the market and therefore require negotiation:
- flood - drought - unexpected hot weather - unexpected cold weather - diseases - war - transportation costs - fertilizer costs - labor costs - legal manipulation - accidents - irrationality
(I left out governments, taxes, and all sorts of illegal things that won't count as "transparent", but exist anyway.)
And that's just to buy grain, a commodity so basic that the Babylonians invented accounting and writing to deal with it.
Yes, you need to negotiate. Sometimes you can just say: "the price you quoted is sufficiently low that I can accept it immediately", but that's merely the fastest negotiation.