Using Bargaining for Advantage in Law School Negotiation Courses

Review Essay: Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. By G. Richard Shell. New York: Viking, 1999.Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

An Explorative Study of the Usage of Negotiation Styles in Higher Education

In everyday life, we usually negotiate intuitively with each other. However, especially through important negotiations, e.g., business negotiations, an optimal outcome is desirable. By preparing the negotiation and training how to negotiate in various conflicts, the negotiation knowledge can be improved and thus negotiators can be more successful in negotiations. 112 Students in higher education were supported in a course and an electronic negotiation training. To examine how students learned negotiation styles, a study was conducted to determine the bias between what they learned and how they applied in electronic negotiations. As a result, the students confirmed that they learned negotiation styles, however, most of them could not identify their own and their counterpart’s styles. Thus, a more individualised training in the course and in the electronic training according to the negotiation styles and negotiation strategies has to be adapted

Using Bargaining for Advantage in Law School Negotiation Courses

Options, options, options ....The Negotiation literature-at least the problem-solving or interestbased or principled negotiation literature\u27repeats this mantra over and over and over. It seems self-evident that having lots of options is a good idea because more options means more to choose from. The more options there are to choose from, however, the more difficult choosing can be. Options, in short, may increase the likelihood that one will make an optimal decision, but they impose added decision costs on the decision maker. Law professors now face this happy dilemma when choosing materials for their Negotiation courses. Options abound-including the negotiation chapters in dispute resolution casebooks, negotiation books written for legal audiences, negotiation books written for non-legal audiences, and a number of good articles--but choosing among them is no easy matter. Richard Shell--a Professor of Legal Studies at the Wharton School of Business-has made this task even more difficult with the publication of his important book, Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. Such luminaries in the negotiation field as Max Bazerman (Kellogg Graduate School of Business), Rod Kramer (Stanford Business School), Howard Raiffa (Harvard Business School), and Larry Susskind (MIT Public Policy) have enthusiastically endorsed the book. Noticeably absent, however, is any commentary from the legal academy about the book\u27s value to law students and lawyers. This review essay seeks to fill that void. My modest aim is to help law professors decide whether Bargaining for Advantage is worth adopting in whole or part in their Negotiation courses