Analyzing Complex Negotiations

Complex negotiations have been conducted for a long time, although until somewhat recently analysts had yet to conceptualize their fundamental nature, their essential elements, and the relationship between these elements. Over the past forty years, however, scholars have gained increasing understanding of the forces that shape negotiation complexity. In this article, I first review literature that has explored complex negotiations, which is found primarily in negotiation studies, and studies of international negotiation. I then develop a five‐part theoretical framework for analyzing complex negotiations: (1) identification of negotiation architecture, (2) context analysis, (3) process analysis, (4) structural and relational analysis, and (5) decisional analysis. I then demonstrate the utility of this five‐part framework by examining the U.S.–Australia Free Trade negotiations that produced the Australia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 2005. Finally, the article closes with some observations on complex negotiations and their analysis.     

Transcending the Classroom: A Practical Guide to Remote Role Plays in Teaching International Negotiation

This article discusses the pedagogical value of using remote role plays in cross‐cultural negotiations between two classes taught simultaneously at different and geographically distant institutions. We argue that remote role‐play simulations provide valuable teaching and learning experiences, and are particularly helpful for managing issues associated with outside‐group negotiation and cultural differences, the prenegotiation stage, electronic negotiations and distorted communication, and one‐shot settings in which the negotiator lacks previous knowledge of the partner. The article begins with a discussion of some critical limitations of “traditional” in‐class role plays, followed by a practical guide to remote role plays and a report of our experiences with them. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of remote role plays as a teaching tool for international negotiation classes and the key lessons for the participating students.     

A Conceptual Framework for Modeling Automated Negotiations in Multiagent Systems

In fully automated e‐negotiation all involved parties are software agents, so negotiation takes place in a multiagent system between software agents that have been developed as a computer system for automating tasks in a specific application domain. A multiagent system is a group of agents that interact and cooperate with each other to fulfill their objectives or to improve their performance. How do these agents negotiate with each other to manage their task interdependencies? What negotiation mechanisms are needed? These are important questions. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for modeling and developing automated negotiation systems. This framework represents and specifies all the necessary concepts and entities for developing a negotiation system as well as the relationships among these concepts. This framework can also be used to model human negotiations scenarios for analyzing these types of negotiations and simulating them with multiagent systems. The work reported in this article is the first unified framework that represents all the needed elements for modeling and developing automated negotiation systems and existing relationships between them.     

Buyer and Seller Differences in Business‐to‐Business Negotiations

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to examine the differences between buyers' and sellers' use of negotiation tactics in face‐to‐face business‐to‐business (B2B) negotiations and second, to explore how negotiators' professed negotiation styles influence buyers' and sellers' use of tactics. The methodology is a multiple case study analysis of eighteen negotiators representing twelve companies in six real‐life buyer–seller negotiations in B2B settings analyzed using qualitative research methods, including both comparative analysis and frequency analysis. We found some difference between buyers' and sellers' use of negotiation tactics, which suggests this question deserves further empirical study. Buyers' and sellers' use of specific tactics differs according to which overall strategy the negotiators chose, and sellers generally use a greater number of negotiation tactics than buyers. The findings challenge previous findings that suggest that B2B negotiations are collaborative and that negotiators communicate in a collaborative manner. The findings also increase our understanding of buyers' and sellers' variable use of tactics in the course of everyday practice as well as the interplay between negotiation tactics and strategies.     

Hard Bargaining in the Classroom: Realistic Simulated Negotiations and Student Values

Empirical research into the negotiation practices of lawyers shows that “hard bargaining,” including at least some unethical conduct, is an inescapable fact of a lawyer's life. To prepare students for legal practice, negotiation instructors must expose them to hard bargaining in the classroom. In doing so, however, instructors should be sensitive to the moral and ethical values of their students, so that the classroom experience does not unduly pressure students to compromise their values. The simulation is the primary tool of negotiation instruction. By selecting and manipulating simulations, a negotiation instructor can expose students to a wide range of negotiating behaviors, from distributive negotiations marked by the use of power tactics to value‐creating negotiations in which participants must consider many interests and collaborative strategies predominate. With that flexibility, however, comes the potential for classroom exercises to pressure students, in ways both subtle and overt, to adopt behaviors that feel uncomfortable. In this article, I examine the use of simulations to teach different types of negotiating behavior, including hard bargaining. Referring to a number of widely available simulations, I suggest ways to focus student attention on three dimensions of negotiation behavior — the issues over which the parties are bargaining, the objectives the parties seek, and the tactics the parties use to achieve their objectives — in order to push students to reflect on their own negotiation behaviors and to prepare for the tactics of others. I assess the potential for simulations to pressure students to compromise their values, and I conclude with my own thoughts on the goals of a negotiation course.     

The Effect of Advice on Negotiations: How Advisors Influence What Negotiators Do

Studies of negotiations often overlook, or at least do not fully account for, the important role played by people who advise negotiators. Often deliberately hidden from view, advisors have important but unrecognized influence on the negotiation dynamic. In this article, I explore the roles and methods of advisors in the negotiation process, drawing on role theory and survey research conducted in 2013 among approximately seventy advisors at the European Union Council of Ministers. I define advice as “a communication from one person (the advisor) to another (the client) for the purpose of helping that second person determine a course of action for solving a particular problem” and consider the nature of this advice and the range of relationships that may exist between advisors and their clients. Advising is much more than the mere transmittal of information from advisor to negotiator and that for advice to be effective a relationship must exist between the two parties. I then identify three models of the advisor–negotiator relationship. The first is the advisor as director, wherein the advisor tends to take control of the negotiating process, directing the negotiator toward actions that she or he should take to achieve success at the negotiation. The second is the advisor as servant, in which the advisor merely responds to the demands of the client for help and guidance in the negotiation. And the third is the advisor as partner, wherein advisor and negotiator jointly manage the process and solve the problem together. Finally, I explore the factors that lead advisors and negotiators to adopt each of these three models, the various advising styles that advisors use, and the differing effects on the negotiation process that these elements may have, drawing on historical examples as well as survey data from the EU Council of Ministers.     

A Network Perspective on Negotiation: What Is New and Why It Matters

The resources that individual negotiators need to solve their problems are not available in a single, concentrated form, and they are certainly not available only within an isolated dyad itself. Instead, the necessary resources are widely dispersed among many actors within networks of business relationships. The best deal is unlikely to be fixed or predetermined, but is rather the outcome of long and time‐consuming negotiations that will then affect further negotiations. In this article, I describe a network perspective on negotiation that considers the relevance and impact of three phenomena that I call (1) vast connectivity, (2) multiple constitutions, and (3) ongoing consent. I further illustrate the applicability of these three factors using examples of real‐life negotiations.     

Diplomatic Interactions and Negotiations

This article examines the role of state actors, organization agencies, and individual agents in diplomatic interactions and negotiations. States as diplomatic actors, organizations as diplomatic agencies, and individuals as diplomatic agents enter into complex and interdependent relationships. Proposing a three‐level analysis of interstate interactions and diplomatic negotiations, I argue that no diplomatic negotiation happens without interactions between parties at the state, organizational, and individual levels. The agency–structure paradigm provides a conceptual framework for understanding behavioral and structural properties of international interactions and their influence on diplomatic negotiations. Diplomatic negotiation employs specific forms of interaction, using a distinct language, protocol norms, symbols, ceremonies, and rituals. The state's “self” (as a social conception of its identity, values, and interests) affects the process of diplomatic negotiation. By managing, organizing, and improving international interactions at the actor, agency, and agent levels, negotiating parties can advance the process and effectiveness of diplomatic negotiation.     

CustomNegotiations.org: A Free Resource for Creating Custom Negotiation Simulations

Negotiation role‐playing simulations are among the most effective and widely used methods for teaching and conducting research on negotiations. Teachers and researchers can either license a published, “off‐the‐shelf” simulation or write their own custom “bespoke” simulation. Off‐the‐shelf simulations are usually high‐quality, include teaching materials, and are typically priced affordably, whereas bespoke simulations are fully customizable and ensure that participants will face a novel challenge. In this article, I introduce a third option: CustomNegotiations.org, a free resource for creating custom negotiation simulations that have the benefits of both off‐the‐shelf and bespoke simulations. I describe this resource and preview how negotiation instructors can use it to customize simulations for their own classes. I also discuss possible future directions for this kind of platform.     

Negotiating democracy with authoritarian regimes. EU democracy promotion in North Africa

ABSTRACT

In order to better understand the dynamics of international cooperation on democracy promotion with authoritarian regimes, this article looks into the processes and results of negotiations on democracy (promotion) between the European Union (EU) and two of its North African neighbours (Morocco, Tunisia) in the decade leading up to the Arab uprisings. Asking if, how, and to what effect the EU and its Mediterranean partners have negotiated issues related to democracy promotion, it analyses official documents issued on the occasion of their respective association council meetings in 2000-2010. It shows that partners have indeed addressed these issues since the early 2000s, however, without engaging in substantive exchanges. Most of the time, conflicts have been neither directly addressed nor resolved. Where there are traces of actual negotiations leading to an agreement, these are clearly based on a logic of bargaining rather than arguing. These findings challenge the picture of harmony and cooperation between the EU and Morocco. Furthermore, they point to the low quality of these exchanges which reinforces the dilemma of international democracy promotion in cooperation with authoritarian regimes.     

Making the Most of the First‐Offer Advantage: Pre‐Offer Conversation and Negotiation Outcomes

Why do some negotiators benefit from making the first offer during negotiations while others do not? This study explores the contents of conversations that take place before negotiators make their first offers in order to learn more about the differences between ultimately successful first offers that benefit from anchoring effects and ultimately unsuccessful ones in which negotiators apparently derive no benefit from making the first offer. In‐depth qualitative analyses of the conversations that role players engaged in prior to their first offers were conducted in simulated negotiation exercises. Their analysis identified five different conversational tactics that negotiators employed in one‐on‐one negotiations to gain power in the negotiation, or what they call here “power conversation tactics.” Their findings suggest that the negotiation outcome (i.e., net value) was related to how the negotiators employed and combined these tactics during the pre‐offer conversation. Based on these findings, they conceptualized four types of power‐gaining/power‐losing pre‐offer conversation scenarios and explored the link between negotiation outcomes and each of these types of pre‐offer conversations. This study further develops the literature on power dynamics and conversations in negotiations as well as the literature on the anchoring effect of a first offer.     

Enhancing Community Leadership Negotiation Skills to Build Civic Capacity

Most intra‐ and interorganizational decision making entails negotiations, and even naturally talented negotiators can improve with training. Executive trainings for managers and leadership programs for publicly elected officials, public managers, and nongovernmental organizations frequently include negotiation modules. These efforts, however, have yet to reach community leaders who also need to develop their negotiation skills. We propose that members of disadvantaged low‐income communities who lack educational and economic opportunities, and are less able to advocate for their own interest, need to build and strengthen their civic capacity, including their negotiation skills, to become more effective parties to decisions affecting them. While many professionals and executives have access to training, such opportunities are less accessible to the leaders of these disadvantaged communities. Although such leaders draw from their own heuristic knowledge, skills, and abilities, they could also benefit from sharpening their negotiation skills. We propose that the multidimensional understanding of their community that members accumulate through direct experience is indispensable, nontransferable to outsiders, and not teachable through in‐class activities. Leaders with the ability to leverage knowledge and assets to connect effectively to community insiders as well as to outside people, institutions, and resources, however, possess some specific inherent personality traits as well an understanding of social structures, strategies, and agency, which can be taught and learned. Such skills as how to conduct negotiations around the table and away from it and how to identify community members who can help and how to rally them are also teachable. The cases were chosen to illustrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that make these leaders effective in and beyond their communities. We highlight those KSAs that we think are teachable in the framework of a negotiation module in community leadership training to enhance civic capacity for community betterment.     

Making Sense of the Sacred

In this note I examine the concept of sacred values. Some commentators have recommended avoiding the question or postponing negotiations until other issues have been settled, whereas others have suggested that few sacred values cannot be rendered into some form of trade‐off (i.e., they are pseudosacred). Here, I follow Scott Atran and Robert Axelrod and argue that ritual and the sacred can be an important component of negotiation and, when addressed effectively, have great potential to break impasse. I first examine the notion of the sacred and its near synonyms, the priceless and the intrinsically valuable. I then look at the issue of valuing life and show that although society places limits on lives as a matter of policy, it paradoxically funds heroic acts, such as mine rescues, which defy economic justification. These acts turn out to fulfill an important symbolic and ritualistic function. Finally, I draw out three implications of the framework for negotiators: negotiators should engage in some form of values clarification among the parties, material compromise by one party does not necessarily indicate that that party's values were not ultimate or that these have been relinquished, and considerable weight should be placed on ritualistic and symbolic gestures with regard to values.     

The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value‐claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in “sharp practice”— an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short‐term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a “Reputation Index.” These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.     

When Negotiations Become Routine: Not Reinventing the Wheel While Thinking Outside the Box

In this article, we seek to apply the insights of recent research on routine to the context of repeated negotiations. To demonstrate the link between both concepts, we introduce an analytical framework in which we identify different negotiation situations in which routine can develop. We distinguish two dimensions of the negotiation process: a problem-solving dimension and a communication dimension. Our framework for analyzing the role of routine in negotiation is built around these two dimensions. We define those skills that we argue in repeated negotiations can help negotiators manage particular kinds of negotiations depending on the level and type of routinization that type of negotiation involves. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework is inherently dynamic, which we illustrate with simplified business examples.     

Cognitive Maelstroms,Nested Negotiation Networks,and Cascading Decision Effects: Modeling and Teaching Negotiation Complexity with Systemic Multiconstituency Exercises

Negotiation practitioners today struggle to manage complex political, economic, and cultural disputes that often involve an array of intertwined issues, parties, process choices, and consequences – both intended and unintended. To prepare next‐generation negotiators for these multifaceted challenges, negotiation instructors must keep pace with the rapidly evolving complexity of today's world. In this article, we introduce systemic multiconstituency exercises (SMCEs), a new educational tool for capturing this emerging reality and helping to close the experiential learning gap between the simulated and the non‐simulated environment. We discuss our pedagogical rationale for developing The Transition, a seventy‐two‐party SMCE inspired by the complex conflicts in Afghanistan and Central Asia and then describe our experiences conducting multiple iterations of this simulation at Harvard University. We argue that SMCEs, in which stakeholders are embedded in clusters of overlapping networks, differ from conventional multiparty exercises because of their immersive character, emergent properties, and dynamic architecture. This design allows for the creation of crucial negotiation complexity challenges within a simulated exercise context, most importantly what we call “cognitive maelstroms,” nested negotiation networks, and cascading decision effects. Because of these features, SMCEs are uniquely suited for training participants in the art of network thinking in complex negotiations. Properly designed and executed, systemic multiconstituency exercises are next‐generation teaching, training, and research platforms that carefully integrate negotiation, leadership, and decision‐making challenges.     

The Promise and Peril of Automated Negotiators

Innovations in artificial intelligence are enabling a new class of applications that can negotiate with people through chat or spoken language. Developed in close collaboration with behavioral science research, these algorithms can detect, mimic, and leverage human psychology, enabling them to undertake such functions as the detection of common mistakes made by novice negotiators. These algorithms can simulate the cognitive processes that shape human negotiations and make use of these models to influence negotiated outcomes. This article reviews some of the scientific advances enabling this technology and discusses how it is being used to advance negotiation research, teaching, and practice.     

State–defence industry relations in the European context: French and UK interactions with the European Defence Agency

While many have noted that EU member states have different preferences over the prospect of an integrated EU defence, analyses that specifically explore state–industry relations in the definition of EU defence-industrial issues, and in the evolution of the Common Security and Defence Policy in general, are lacking. This is surprising, given that different configurations of government–industry relations have represented a persistent impediment to European defence-industrial cross-border collaboration. This article investigates how state–defence industry relations impact on member states’ preferences towards the EU defence-industrial framework. Based on the case studies of the interaction of France and the UK with the European Defence Agency, this analysis focuses on the difference between public and private defence firms’ governance settings as the crucial explanatory variable accounting for diverging member states’ preferences in this domain.     

Interpretive Filters: Social Cognition and the Impact of Turning Points in Negotiation

A number of studies have shown that certain events that occur during a negotiation can alter its course. Referred to as "turning points," these events are precipitated by actions taken either outside or inside the talks that have consequences for outcomes. In this article, we report the results of two experiments designed to examine the impacts of two types of precipitating actions, external and internal. In the first experiment, which focused on external actions, we found that crises — as opposed to breakthroughs — produced more movement in negotiations in which parties viewed the social climate positively (high trust, low power). We found that parties achieved less movement in negative social climates (low trust, high power).
In the second experiment, which focused on internal actions, we found that cooperative precipitants (factors inducing change) were more likely to occur when parties negotiated in the context of positive social climates. Negotiation outcomes were also influenced by the climate: we found better individual outcomes for negotiations that occurred in positive climates (high trust, cooperative orientations). Inboth experiments, the social climate of the negotiation moderated the effects of precipitating factors on negotiation outcomes. Perceptions of trust and power filter the way negotiators interpret actions that occur outside or are taken inside a negotiation, which can lead to agreements or impasses.