Negotiation Stands Alone

Yes, the authors concede, “everybody” negotiates: but that’s like saying “everybody drives,” and then watching aghast when “everybody” climbs into a racing car, or an eighteen-wheeled tractor trailer. The authors draw from Tsur’s experience teaching Israeli hostage negotiators and in other high-pressure environments to argue for an entirely distinct concept of a professional negotiator, one that starts with a rather experienced “student” and builds a sharply different training regimen from there

Learning (Not) To Yield: An Experimental Study of Evolving Ultimatum Game Behavior

Whether behavior converges toward rational play or fair play in repeated ultimatum games depends on which player yields first. If responders concede first by accepting low offers, proposers would not need to learn to offer more, and play would converge toward unequal sharing. By the same token, if proposers learn fast that low offers are doomed to be rejected and adjust their offers accordingly, pressure would be lifted from responders to learn to accept such offers. Play would converge toward equal sharing. Here we tested the hypothesis that it is regret-both material and strategic-which determines how players modify their behavior. We conducted a repeated ultimatum game experiment with random strangers, in which one treatment does and another does not provide population feedback in addition to informing players about their own outcome. Our results show that regret is a good predictor of the dynamics of play. Specifically, we will turn to the dynamics that unfold when players make repeated decisions in the ultimatum game with randomly changing opponents, and when they learn not only about their own outcome in the previous round but also find out how the population on average has adapted to previous results (path dependence).Ultimatum bargaining game, Reputation, Regret, Learning, Experiment

IWS briefing, Summer 2007 Volume 7 Issue 2

[Excerpt] A newsletter on workplace issues and research from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University

Structural Power and Emotional Processes in Negotiation: A Social Exchange Approach

This chapter focuses in the abstract on when and how repeated negotiations between the same actors foster positive feelings or emotions and, in turn, an affective commitment to their relationship. However, we have in mind applications to pivotal dyads within organizations and also to the emergence of friction” or stickiness” in market relations. Implicit in the idea that negotiations in pivotal dyads shape institutional patterns is the notion that repeated negotiations between the same two actors are likely to become more than instrumental ways for the particular actors to get work done. We suggest a simple process by which dyadic negotiations give rise to incipient affective commitments that make the relationship an expressive object of attachment in its own right. When such transformations occur, future negotiations are not just efforts to solve yet another concrete issue or problem that the particular actors face; they come to symbolize or express the existence of a positive, productive relationship. Commitments that have an emotional/affective component tend to make the exchange relation an objective reality with intrinsic value to actors. In Berger and Luckmann\u27s (1967) terms, the relation becomes a third force.

Social preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining

We assess the extent of preferences for employment in a collective wage bargaining situation with heterogeneous workers. We vary the size of the union and introduce a treatment mechanism transforming the voting game into an individual allocation task. Our results show that highly productive workers do not take employment of low productive workers into account when making wage proposals, regardless of whether insiders determine the wage or all workers. The level of pro-social preferences is small in the voting game, while it increases as the game is transformed into an individual allocation task. We interpret this as an accountability effect

Entertainment in the 21st Century: Is an Independent Networked Multimedia Production and Promotion Firm a Viable Business Option in the Modern Entertainment Industry?

“Artists are being stifled by the ‘major label’ stance that exclusively demands what’s ours is ours and can only be handled by us. It should be more about creative freedom” (Monstercat Manifesto). Over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed how the internet has changed how entertainment is distributed and consumed. This has led to a change in behavior from major entertainment production firms, and has given way to the surge of independent labels and production houses. Now, entertainers can lead successful careers by reaching their audience through digital platforms, successfully decreasing production and distribution costs. Consumers can find an unlimited amount of ad-supported content that they can access for free. Understanding these change is vital in finding and solving the problems these changes have produced

Practicing What We Preach: Using Professional Degree Principles to Improve HRIR and Management Teaching

Many of the central principles of professional degrees taught to HRIR and business school students-putting theory into practice, knowing your customers, benchmarking against best practices, and using diverse toolkits for problem solving-are equally valid for the practice of teaching HRIR and business courses. Learning theory needs to be put into practice in the professional classroom, instructors must understand students and their diverse learning styles, teaching practices should be benchmarked against best practices, and instructors need to develop teaching toolkits for creating effective courses. As teachers of professional students, we should practice what we preach.

Learning to negotiate reality: a strategy for teaching intercultural competencies

Managers in a global business environment work with people who have different values, behavioral norms, and ways of perceiving reality. Team members bring their different national and professional backgrounds to the table, and suppliers and clients come from different corporate cultures. Consequently, intercultural competencies have become important for a wider range and larger number of people in business than ever before. In order to prepare students to become effective in the multiple cultural contexts they will face, business educators must clarify what constitutes intercultural competencies and how to develop them within the context of a business school classroom. In this paper we present the idea of learning to negotiate reality as a core intercultural competence and we describe an approach we designed and used for developing this competence at an international business school in Europe. -- Die Fähigkeit, mit Menschen aus unterschiedlichen nationalen, professionellen, ethnischen und organisationellen Kulturen zu arbeiten wird immer wichtiger. Sei es in Projektgruppen mit Mitgliedern aus verschiedenen Ländern und mehreren Funktionsbereichen, sei es in Verhandlungen mit Kunden und Lieferanten: kulturell geprägte Werte und Verhaltensnormen beeinflussen die Erwartungen über Ziele und Vorgehensweisen und können zu Missverständnissen und Konflikten führen. Interkulturelle Kompetenz, im Sinne der Fähigkeit, ein gemeinsames Verständnis einer Situation auszuhandeln (negotiating reality) gewinnt in Organisationen immer mehr an Bedeutung. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt wie diese Kompetenz im Rahmen eines drei- bis viertägigen Seminars entwickelt werden kann. Die relevanten Theorien werden dargestellt und an einem ausgewählten Fall illustrativ angewandt.

Timing and Virtual Observability in Ultimatum Bargaining and "Weak Link" Coordination Games

Previous studies have shown that simply knowing one player moves first can affect behavior in games, even when the first-mover's moves are known to be unobservable. This observation violates the game-theoretic principle that timing of unobserved moves is irrelevant, but is consistent with virtual observability, a theory of how timing can matter without the ability to observe actions. However, this previous research only shows that timing matters in games where knowledge that one player moved first can help select that player's preferred equilibrium, presenting an alternative explanation to virtual observability. We extend this work by varying timing of unobservable moves in ultimatum bargaining games and “weak link” coordination games. In the latter, the equilibrium selection explanation does not predict any change in behavior due to timing differences. We find that timing without observability affects behavior in both games, but not substantially