Actual Negotiation Research Articles

Are social contracts possible without actual negotiation?

AbstractThis article addresses one of the several moral arguments for the state, the social contract argument, showing that this argument has been inadequately justified. The terms of any contract are determined by negotiation among the parties to the contract. The terms of any contract cannot be known absent actual negotiation to produce them. Social contract theorists widely believe that actual negotiation and actual agreement with a social contract did not occur, so their theories rest on hypothetical scenarios in which people would agree to the contract’s terms. Because actual negotiations did not produce a social contract, one cannot know its terms. This calls into question whether people could be obligated to abide by a social contract whose terms were not negotiated and hence are unknowable.

The Significance of Communication in Resolving Disputes: Insights into the Negotiation Process in BRT Project, Peshawar

Negotiation means reaching a mutual consensus with the aim of resolving the disputes with acceptable solutions for all the parties. Negotiation is common in day-to-day affairs, but is of more significance in the areas, like contracts, business deals and domestic problems. The literature shows that negotiation is a communication process and provides a medium for the opposite sides to sit across the table and resolve the disputes and conflicts. Contrary to this, the available literature emphasis more on the decision-making aspect of the negotiation, but lacks discussion on the communication processes, which can in fact make or break a deal, project, or a contract. To address this issue, the aim of this study was to investigate the communication processes in an actual negotiation scenario. For this purpose, the communication processes in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) were studied and 30 interviews were conducted from the project team and the affected persons. Data was analyzed using applications of constructivist grounded theory which leads to the formation of Communication as a major theme of study. The results exhibit that communication serves as a medium for exchange of information and has an integral part in negotiation processes. Meetings, interactions, discussions, and networking emerged as major themes of communication in this study, and it mediates the negotiation process and leads to the resolution of disputes. Therefore, effective communication plays a significant role in negotiation, reaching agreements and resolving disputes. This research studied negotiation and communication in BRT project only. Further studies could analyze the negotiation processes in other projects and scenarios to further elaborate mediation of communication in negotiations.

Parliamentary negotiations in Denmark

Negotiation theory tells us how we should negotiate if we want to negotiate wisely. We learn how to make the cake larger and how to get as big a bite as possible. Negotiations are key in politics. Even so, not many scientific studies apply the negotiation theory framework to legislative negotiations, including Danish legislative negotiations. On the other hand, there is a literature that describes actual legislative negotiations in Denmark. To what extent do the negotiations literature and the described real-life negotiations match each other? Danish politicians can learn from negotiation theory to varying degrees, and negotiation theory can learn from Danish legislative negotiations. The dominant role of the minister in parliamentary negotiations substantially reduces the complexity problems normally associated with multiparty negotiations.

Business Negotiation Skills in Enterprise Mergers and Acquisitions

In recent years, with the progress of the times, more and more enterprises have chosen to acquire promising small companies and hope to work together to achieve transformation and upgrading, otherwise, they will face the risk of being eliminated from the market. This article studies the actual business negotiation case of Gree Electric's acquisition of Yinlong New Energy Company, analyzes whether the acquisition conforms to the interests of both companies, and the risks brought by the acquisition. It also analyzes the game process in detail. In business negotiations, there is inevitably conflict, so the use of negotiation strategies is essential. This article analyzes how to use language skills to effectively communicate with the other party in business negotiations, as well as how to skillfully apply offensive and defensive strategies to negotiations, in order to maximize the interests of both parties. Finally, this article believes that business negotiations also have a cooperative nature. To create a situation where one plus one is greater than two, both parties to the negotiation should implement the win-win concept and jointly explore the optimal solution through active communication.

Rise and Fall of Ordinary Course Covenants and MAE Clauses: Case and Trend Analysis

In the United States, the ordinary course of business provision has received inadequate attention in the field of corporate mergers and acquisitions. As anyone in the field is probably aware, the ordinary course of business covenant (“OC Covenant”) is one of the most common provisions included in almost every merger agreement. Illustrated by the fact that there are remarkably few notable precedents for the OC Covenant, despite its prevalence in merger agreements, notions of implementations and implications of the covenant have not drawn much attention from related professionals and scholars.
 In turn, material adverse effect provisions (“MAE Provision”) have been “The Beatles” of mergers and acquisitions in the United States. Since its increased practical relevance from the subprime mortgage crisis, many notable precedents have since proved and confirmed that the MAE Provision’s sophisticated and complex enforcement standards made this provision extremely difficult to execute in the real world. However, in actual merger negotiations the provision has never stepped down from its celebrity status. Many influential theorists view the MAE Provision as having absolute authority in connection with risk allocation during the time from signing agreements to closing the transaction, and with such recognition in past decades, the MAE Provision holds an untouchable significance by being perceived as an attractive route to call off agreed transactions in a crisis.
 This article proclaims that given recent trends in contract drafting and court decisions in connection with risk allocation during the interim period between signing and closing the merger, the role of the OC Covenant has been strengthened. To support this analysis, this article will proceed as follows. In Part I, this article will introduce the general features and background for the MAE Provision and the OC Covenant. In Part II, this article will introduce relevant risk allocation theories that have been suggested to govern risk allocation in order to present the history of important theories and their developments. In Parts III and IV, this article will examine features and developments of the MAE Provision and the OC Covenant with case examinations and literature analysis. The sections will refer to the 2021 data examination that Professor Guhan Subramanian conducted by examining 1,293 merger agreements in the MergerMetrics Database. The analysis will cover current structural shapes, as well as legal interpretation standards from meaningful precedents. Finally, in Part V, this article will propose a new understanding scheme for the risk allocation structure that implements and combines the academic theories, and drafting and litigation trends.

Moral power of youth activists – Transforming international climate Politics?

Youth Climate Activists are important norm entrepreneurs as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices. But how successful have these activists been in shifting perspectives in the context of international climate politics? This paper aims to investigate (1) to what extent the normative framework advanced by this movement is increasingly penetrating the international public climate debate, changing arguments, priorities, and frames around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and (2) the key actors pushing for normative change. Using a unique and comprehensive Twitter dataset for the period between 2014 and 2021 revolving around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and major youth climate protest events we combine various computational methods, including transformers-based topic modelling and social network analysis in this study. We find that indeed the normative framework advanced by the movement has successfully penetrated the discourse around UNFCCC and that youth climate activists were able gain support from central actors outside the movement, which is further contributing to the diffusion of their normative framework. We conclude that while these results demonstrate the moral power of youth climate activists, more research is needed to understand the influence on the actual negotiations outcomes

The Delegation of the Bohemian King-Elector to the Election of the New Roman King in Frankfurt am Main, 1745

It may seem that we know a lot about the elections and coronations of Roman kings and emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this also applies to the one of 1745, when Francis I Stephen became emperor. However, very little attention has been paid to the electoral delegations, their tasks, and their role in the pre-election negotiations. This article will therefore analyse the instructions issued by Queen Maria Theresa of Bohemia, who did not personally come to Frankfurt am Main for the election, to her diplomats. The analysis will then be supplemented by additional sources from the National Archives in Prague, where the reports of the delegation and other sources have been preserved. The election of 1745 is thoroughly compared with the elections of 1657–58 (Leopold I), 1711 (Charles VI), and 1742 (Charles VII). The author shows who made up the Bohemian delegation and how some of these diplomats’ tasks changed over time. Although the delegation of three noblemen – Counts Wurmbrand and Khevehüller, and Baron Hilleprand – had mainly ceremonial tasks, its role was also crucial in the actual negotiations, both on the very day of the election, then when it represented the Queen in the cathedral, and finally in conclave vote and when it was given other tasks (such as organising the celebratory banquet, illuminating the houses, etc.). It is evident that the delegation helped Queen Maria Theresa and her family regain possession of the imperial title.

Wage bargaining and employment revisited: separability and efficiency in collective bargaining*

AbstractWe analyse the two‐dimensional Nash bargaining solution (NBS) by deploying the standard labour market negotiations model of McDonald and Solow. We show that the two‐dimensional bargaining problem can be decomposed into two one‐dimensional problems, such that the two solutions together replicate the solution of the two‐dimensional problem if the NBS is applied. The axiom of “independence of irrelevant alternatives” is shown to be crucial for this type of decomposability. This result has significant implications for actual negotiations because it allows for the decomposition of a multi‐dimensional bargaining problem into one‐dimensional problems – and thus helps to facilitate real‐world negotiations.

Conflict Resolution

TRULY effective and successful human negotiation and the resolution of conflict (also where South Africa is concerned) can only be developed by a process preceding actual negotiation. Destructive tendencies resulting from perceptions or expectations deeply rooted in different cultural backgrounds, can only be overcome through the conscious effort to create a basic, mutually acceptable communication sub-culture in which trust plays a central role. Rather than approaching any given negotiation situation with a fixed, preconceived action model already in mind, communication scholars will have to begin their work much earlier. Individual, social, and cultural components which exist prior to interpersonal communication situations will have to be identified and studied. This approach requires the initial acceptance of complexity, and the ability to allow specific conditions to assist them in discovering and developing situationally appropriate techniques.

Boost a New Function of CPPCC in Grassroots — Based on the Implementation of “Proper Negotiation” Carried out by Jiangsu Province

There are plenty of measures to negotiate appropriately. Motivating the public to tackle communal affairs via appropriate negotiation is the main request delivered by the socialist negotiatory democracy. In order to implement it, the Provincial CPPCC in Jiangsu pioneered an innovative way by extending the unique advantages of themselves. As a particular consultative body to the basic governance practice, the Provincial CPPCC creates a new function and builds a practical platform to promote actual negotiation. It develops the definition of primary negotiation and creates a chance for basal CPPCC to boost grassroots governance. This approach has specific universal outreach value. It has solved many complex problems that emerged before and has drawn much attention from the academic and practical circles.

Modelling the Iranian Petroleum Contract fiscal regime using bargaining game theory to guide contract negotiators

Based on Iran's sixth development plan, the country's oil and gas industry requires an investment of about $200bn in the next five years to increase production. The Iranian government, to attract and motivate international oil company investment in their oil and gas fields, has presented a new type of risk service contract: the Iranian Petroleum Contract (IPC). This paper summarizes the features of the IPC and presents mathematical models of its fiscal regime for the benefit and guidance of both the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and the contractors. Next, adopting bargaining game theory provides a mathematical model for reaching a win-win situation between the NIOC and the contractor. Finally, a numerical example is given and a sensitivity analysis performed to illustrate the implementation of the proposed models. The contractor and the NIOC may use these models when preparing their proposal and in the course of actual negotiations to calculate their internal rate of return, remuneration fee, and net present value for developing the fields at different conditions of their bargaining power, and derive a logical bargain to protect their best possible interests.

Developing emotional intelligence skills for e-negotiations

The purpose of this paper is to provide a low-cost, effective way to teach emotional intelligence (EI) skills for email communications by utilizing Dale Carnegie’s 30 Human Relations Principles. Our teaching approach is based on an actual multiple-party negotiation that included an executive from a Fortune 500 Company. Utilizing negotiation enhances students’ critical thinking about real-world, business decision-making scenarios. Active learning is incorporated into the project through student collaboration and reflection. Finally, the project can be administered completely online through the school’s learning management system, which reduces demand on valuable class time. We provide extensive resources to assist instructors in teaching EI and administering the project.

Women in Diplomacy: The Ambassadress Seen by Friedrich Carl von Moser

Any analysis of women’s place in the early modern diplomatic world must necessarily begin by recognising the important role played by female rulers (that is, women who ruled in their own right), queens (wives or widows of monarchs), and female regents. Some female rulers were indeed involved in diplomatic negotiations, but it is difficult to determine their true role: were they actual negotiators or mere intermediaries? And apart from rulers, could women act as political agents in foreign countries? Archival documents show that, behind the scenes, women were often very influential (Lucien Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 174–182.). In this paper I shall try to answer these questions, and to offer a theoretical approach about women in diplomacy. I shall do this by looking at Friedrich Carl von Moser’s treatise L’Ambassadrice et ses droits: an essay, maybe a unique one, about the ‘ambassadress’ – a term that Moser uses to refer to both a female diplomat in her own right and the wife of an ambassador (Friedrich Carl von Moser, L’Ambassadrice et ses droits (Berlin: Etienne de Bourdeaux, 1754).).

Wage Bargaining and Employment Revisited: Separability and Efficiency in Collective Bargaining

We analyse the two-dimensional Nash bargaining solution (NBS) deploying a standard labour market negotiations model (McDonald and Solow, 1981). We show that the two-dimensional bargaining problem can be decomposed into two one-dimensional problems such that the two solutions together replicate the solution of the two-dimensional problem, if the NBS is applied. The axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives turns out to be crucial for decomposability. Our result has significant implications for actual negotiations, as it allows for the decomposition of a multi-dimensional bargaining problem into simpler problems—and thus helps to facilitate real-world negotiations.

Value of risk information in negotiations with evolving preferences

Guidance on negotiation stresses thorough and careful preparation during the pre-negotiation phase leading up to the actual negotiation discussion. One vital aspect of preparation is to evaluate the interests, preferences, and priorities of both yourself and the opposing party. Traditional negotiation models treat preferences as static. However, preferences may be dynamic, and may change as scenarios before, during, or after the negotiation unfold. These scenarios influence preferences and therefore the payoffs associated with possible joint settlements. In this paper, we develop a model which views integrative negotiations through the lens of scenario analysis, in which scenarios influence the preferences of both negotiators. The result of scenario-based preferences is that different Pareto-efficient frontiers exist across multiple scenarios, which has implications for strategy and decision making. We apply the method to an illustrative case study of job choice between an applicant and employer under a number of relevant scenarios. The case study demonstrates the process of assessing the impacts of scenarios on joint payoffs, the identification of the most and least disruptive scenarios, and the utilization of different decision rules to select efficient contracts.

The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War by Morgan Michael Cotey (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 588 Morgan, Michael Cotey. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. America in the World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2018. xi + 396 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00: £27.00. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War is a truly international history of the process that led to the signing oftheHelsinkiAccordsin1975anditsaftermath.TheHelsinkiAccordswerethe outcome of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and in the book, Michael Cotey Morgan analyses the process which was initiated by Leonid Brezhnev, negotiated for almost three years by hundreds of diplomats, and finally signed by thirty-five European, Soviet, and North American heads of state. The Final Act debunks the many myths and simplifications about the Helsinki agreement that have surrounded it ever since 1975 and is an extremely valuable contribution to the current reevaluation of the late Cold War. The book is organized chronologically around three main questions: ‘Why was the CSCE created in the first place? Why did the Final Act take the shape that it did? And how did it influence the Cold War?’ (p. 4). Morgan argues that while the CSCE’s significance was underestimated at the time, the Final Act proved very consequential for Europe and its place in the international system, and the 1975 Helsinki Summit should therefore claim its prominence as the successor to the 1815 Congress of Vienna or the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This emphasis on the importance of the CSCE and the resulting European order also elevates the West and the role some key Western actors, such as Willy Brandt, Georges Pompidou and Richard Nixon, played in the process, but Leonid Brezhnev is also in the midst of the narrative, which takes into account the context of the Cold War. One of the most astonishing things about the Helsinki process is how many diverse actors were involved. The dominant actors were the United States and the Soviet Union, but the dividing Iron Curtain did not govern the process. Morgan does a great job of showing how the hundreds of diplomats involved in negotiating the process could advance and retreat at different points in time; indeed it comes out very clearly how diplomatic the process actually was. The preparatory talks took longer than anyone had suspected, with delegations arriving in Geneva in September 1973 and completing their work in July 1975. Chapter four, ‘The Meaning of Security’, discusses the workload, bureaucracy, tactics and personalities, and brings out ‘the mixture of tedium and exhilaration that characterized life at the CSCE’ (p. 114). The Western media was not very interested in the preparatory talks but, as instructed from above, the Soviet and Eastern bloc media discussed the overall process in a positive light, criticizing the ‘Western governments for demanding too much’ (p. 112). The Soviet delegation in Geneva was by far the largest, with Anatolii REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Morgan debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Morgan also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a...

Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland by Szczerbiak Aleks (review)

REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Cotey debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Cotey also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a secretive process governed by the superpowers. Cotey has succeeded in creating an effortless narrative of a complicated international diplomatic process while highlighting its far-reaching importance. The Final Act is based on archival research in eight countries, a long list of published diplomatic documents, interviews and periodicals, and an excellent command of the existing historiography. It is hard to imagine a more balanced account. This book is sure to become the standard work of reference for research focusing on topics as varied as human rights, trade relations, activist groups and international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s. Department of History and Classical Studies Rósa Magnúsdóttir Aarhus University Szczerbiak, Aleks. Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 121. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018. vii + 198 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Appendix. Index.£115.00. As as one would expect from this author, Politicising the Communist Past provides an authoritative and balanced analysis of the post-Communist political scene. Aleks Szczerbiak’s study of the convoluted politics of transitional justice and truth revelation in Poland will particularly interest students of Central and Eastern Europe, but also provides food for thought to readers interested in the dilemmas of enacting transitional justice in other SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 590 countries across the globe. The book investigates why — despite initial talk of drawing a line under the past — dilemmas around transitional justice refused to go away in Poland after 1989. They have frequently dominated the political agenda, and remain acutely painful and polarizing today. Poland is an interesting case study of a country which, having failed to deal energetically with matters of transitional justice in the early days of the post-Communist regime,foundthepoliticsofthepastintrudingagainandagainintothepolitics of the present. Moreover, Szczerbiak argues that the Polish case illustrates the impossibility, in post-Communist Europe, of disentangling the two strands of political debate concerning historical truth revelation procedures. The first strand concerns the extent and nature of access to Communist-era secret police files. The second concerns lustration policies, aimed at vetting and screening public office-holders to reveal who had been associated with the communist regime, particularly its security services. Szczerbiak considers in detail why such matters could not be swept under the carpet. He shows how a sequence of sensational revelations — some occurring almost by chance — helped keep the issues alive across the decades. However, the main focus of the book is on the role played by politicians: Szczerbiak weighs the evidence in support of competing interpretations as to why the arguments proved so difficult to resolve. On the one hand, ‘instrumentalstrategic ’ explanations focus on how politicians manipulate and even manufacture the debate for political purposes. On the other, ‘programmaticideological ’ explanations place more emphasis on political actors’ beliefs that genuine democracy can only be constructed on the basis of openness about the past, and their concerns that...

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

ABSTRACTIn 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.

Deception and Israeli Peacemaking since 1967

The failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict for many years has often been attributed in significant part to the absence of trust in the sincerity of the other side and, more specifically, to the recalcitrant nature of the opponent. Analyses of past proposals and actual negotiations have pointed out missed opportunities, possibly the result of misperceptions or misunderstandings. Recent archival research, publications, and interviews regarding the Israeli protagonists reveal that actual deception, as distinct from ‘misperception’, may have been at play. The article examines this phenomenon as it has appeared since 1967 in six instances of Israeli government dealings with its own public and with the US or the international community, even in recent months, due primarily to an unwillingness to withdraw from the Occupied Territories or agree to enter serious negotiations for ending the conflict with the Palestinians.

Strategic participation in competitive electricity markets: Internal versus sectorial data analysis

Current approaches for risk management in energy market participation mostly refer to portfolio optimization for long-term planning, and stochastic approaches to deal with uncertainties related to renewable energy generation and market prices variation. Risk assessment and management as integrated part of actual market negotiation strategies is lacking from the current literature. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel model for decision support of players’ strategic participation in electricity market negotiations, which considers risk management as a core component of the decision-making process. The proposed approach addresses the adaptation of players’ behaviour according to the participation risk, by combining the two most commonly used approaches of forecasting in a company’s scope: the internal data analysis, and the external, or sectorial, data analysis. The internal data analysis considers the evaluation of the company’s evolution in terms of market power and profitability, while the sectorial analysis addresses the assessment of the competing entities in the market sector using a K-Means-based clustering approach. By balancing these two components, the proposed model enables a dynamic adaptation to the market context, using as reference the expected prices from competitor players, and the market price prediction by means of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Results under realistic electricity market simulations using real data from the Iberian electricity market operator show that the proposed approach is able to outperform most state-of-the-art market participation strategies, reaching a higher accumulated profit, by adapting players’ actions according to the participation risk.