In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) as an emerging content dissemination platform, mobile nodes opportunistically exchange content as they meet, with the intent of disseminating content among nodes that share common interests. During a meeting, nodes can exchange both content of direct interest to themselves as well as content that is of interest to a larger set of nodes that may be encountered in the future. The utility of DTN is governed by the content exchange opportunity (the amount of content that can be exchanged during a meeting) as well as the selection of content to be exchanged in order to maximise the interest nodes will have in information they are exposed to. Considering that there is a cost associated with the content exchange (e.g. battery usage, buffer occupancy or consumed transmission opportunity) the aim for nodes participating in content dissemination should be to maximise their payoff. In this paper, we contribute a generic framework for describing the characteristics of content exchange among participating nodes in a network. We incorporate a distributed information popularity measurement and the pairwise interaction of nodes modelled as a bargaining problem. The outcome of this process is the fair split up of dwelling time as a network resource and the selection of which content objects to exchange in order to maximise the nodes’ payoff. The framework is generally intended to be used as a capstone for investigation of content dissemination properties and various content exchange strategies in a DTN, a topic addressed in this paper and experiments conducted to validate the function and correctness of the proposed framework.