The global concern on environmental issues is placing its mark on all sectors of the society, including of course, the wireless telecommunications industry. In this paper, we develop a microeconomic-based ‘green’ radio framework in which a network operator shifts some of its responsibilities towards the intended destination to one of these inactive end-users with the specific intention of reducing the transmitted power of its source nodes and the incurred costs. Our results disclose up to 70% energy savings and up to 65% cost savings over the direct transmission benchmarker, when selecting from approximately 50 eligible relays in the scenario portrayed by the UMTS Rel. 99 standard.