The Meaning of Intuition for the Negotiation Process and Outcome

Intuition is a useful tool for negotiators, as negotiations are often highly complex endeavors in which people make holistic judgments with incomplete information and no time for deliberation. Therefore, one might expect that intuition greatly influences negotiations and their outcomes and that negotiators would use intuition to their advantage. However, there is almost no systematic research into the meaning of intuition for negotiation. In this conceptual paper, drawing on five interviews of experienced negotiators, we apply general research on intuition to the specific case of negotiation and find that negotiators use intuition specifically for attribution and social interaction. We distinguish different intuition attitudes; identify preparation, time, and negotiation stages as relevant drivers for the use of intuition in negotiation; clarify the distinction between intuition and routine; and shine new light on the concept of domain-specific knowledge.     

No Sheriff in Town: Governance for Online Dispute Resolution

Online dispute resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid‐1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field — in both the public and private sectors. As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions — already beginning to be heard from within the field — derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field. In this article, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field's governance and suggest that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low‐to‐no” state of governance in ODR — and the developments that are likely, should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher‐governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed, no matter how beneficial internal governance may be. We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions — but, rather, to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions — and why these decisions might have far‐reaching implications for a wide range of conflict‐related fields.     

Does Terrorism Pay? An Empirical Analysis

Does terrorism help perpetrators to achieve their demands? Few research questions about terrorism generate as much controversy. This study contributes to the debate in two main ways. First, we identify major limitations within the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of terrorism. Specifically, we highlight the main methodological problems vexing empirical assessments of whether terrorism promotes government concessions. Second, we present a research design that circumvents those recurrent methodological shortcomings. In short, we find no empirical evidence to suggest that terrorism pays. In fact, multiple variants of the tactic in hostage standoffs impede the perpetrators from coercing government compliance. The negative effect of terrorism on the odds of compliance is significant and substantial across logistic and multilevel logistic model specifications, particularly when civilians are killed or wounded in the coercive incident. These findings have important implications for both scholars and practitioners of counterterrorism.     

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.     

Arms Negotiation,War Exhaustion,and the Credibility of Preventive War

Why do some states agree to suspend their weapons programs in exchange for compensation while others fail to come to terms? I argue that the changing credibility of preventive war is an important determinant of arms construction. If preventive war is never an option, states can reach mutually preferable settlements. However, if preventive war is not credible today but will be credible in the future, a commitment problem results: the state considering investment faces a “window of opportunity” and must build the arms or it will not receive concessions later on. Thus, agreements fail under these conditions. I then apply the theoretical findings to the Soviet Union’s decision to build nuclear weapons in 1949. War exhaustion made preventive war not credible for the United States immediately following World War II, but lingering concerns about future preventive action induced Moscow to proliferate.     

Sequencing Negotiating Partners: Implications for the Two‐Level Game?

In the late 1990s, Japan and South Korea concluded their first bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) in completely opposite sequences despite similar domestic pressures. Japan concluded an "easier" FTA with Singapore first and then concluded a more "difficult" FTA with Mexico. South Korea concluded a more difficult FTA first with Chile and then moved on to negotiate with Singapore. In this article, I analyze these cases and review the literature on bargaining and two-level games to develop a model of how these differences in sequence account in part for the relative differences in each country's bargaining strength in their more difficult negotiations. The preexistence of the Singapore FTA eased domestic pressures to reap the benefits of entry into the bilateral FTA game. Thus, Japan could approach the more difficult FTA negotiation knowing that a "no-agreement" outcome would not fundamentally increase domestic pressure to get into the free trade "game." This alternative to no agreement put the Japanese in a stronger international bargaining position. South Korea negotiated its harder case knowing that the relative domestic pressure to get in the FTA game would increase without an agreement. This relatively worse bargaining position created a context in which South Korea conceded more internationally at the expense of higher side payments domestically.     

Looking at Negotiation and Dispute Resolution through a CA/DA Lens

Negotiation analysts have increasingly focused on the internal decision‐making dynamics in the minds of the parties. They ought to give more attention to the ways in which meaning is jointly constituted through sequences of verbal and nonverbal exchanges. The tools of conversation analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA) can be helpful in this regard.     

Consensus Arbitration: A Negotiation‐Based Decision‐Making Process for Arbitrators

In reaching their decisions, arbitrators are currently expected to act like judges by listening fully to both sides and then withdrawing to write the final and complete decision. But because of some key differences between their roles, I argue, arbitrators and judges should exercise completely different styles of decision making. Unlike judges, who make decisive rulings in order to enforce the law, arbitrators are empowered and chosen by the parties themselves to handle specific disputes or govern continuing relationships. Instead of shifting a negotiated process into an authoritative one, arbitrators have the capacity to solicit input from parties as they craft the award. Under a new model of arbitration that I call “consensus arbitration,” arbitrators would facilitate negotiation between the parties but retain the power to break impasses with partial, incomplete decisions, behaving more like facilitators than judges.     

Seeking Sustainable Solutions: Using an Attractor Simulation Platform for Teaching Multistakeholder Negotiation in Complex Cases

We live and work in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. The demands of working in such environments require that negotiators understand situations of conflict and work with these situations in correspondingly complex and dynamic ways. Dynamical systems theory offers important insights and tools to enhance the understanding of difficult social conflicts, including the conceptualization of ongoing destructive conflicts as strong attractors: a particular form of self-organization of multiple elements comprising the mental and social systems associated with conflict. This article describes the pedagogical use of a computer simulation of conflict attractors (the attractor software) that allows participants to visualize and work interactively with the dynamics of conflict as they unfold over time. It further describes a negotiation workshop that employs the simulation to enhance participants' understanding of complex long-term dynamics in conflict and presents the findings of two outcome studiescomparing the effectiveness of a workshop that employed the simulation with one that employed a traditional integrative problem-solving method. While not definitive, these studies suggest that an understanding of the dynamical approach to conflict, supported by use of the attractor software, can promote the generation of more sustainable solutions for long-term conflicts.     

Psychological Barriers to Resolving Intergroup Conflict: An Extensive Review and Consolidation of the Literature

This article reviews over sixty years of research on psychological barriers to intergroup conflict resolution and finds that scholars have identified eighty nominally different barriers that create or exacerbate intergroup conflict. In order to create a tractable list that would be more helpful to future scholars and practitioners, we consolidate this vast literature (e.g., by eliminating substantive and conceptual redundancies) to produce a list of twenty‐six “unique” psychological barriers. We further organize this inventory of barriers with a framework that distinguishes between “cognitive,” “affective,” and “motivated” psychological barriers. To better understand the literature ecosystem of research on psychological barriers, we employ a data visualization tool to illustrate the extent to which each of the twenty‐six unique barriers has been studied conjointly with every other barrier in the articles we reviewed. We then shift our attention to the work of scholars who have attempted, experimentally, to attenuate psychological barriers in negotiation and conflict settings, and identify five primary methods for doing so. Finally, we discuss the implications of our review for future work in this field.