Negotiation Behavior Research Articles

Autonomous multirobot excavation for lunar applications

SUMMARYIn this paper, a control approach called Artificial Neural Tissue (ANT) is applied to multirobot excavation for lunar base preparation tasks including clearing landing pads and burying of habitat modules. We show for the first time, a team of autonomous robots excavating a terrain to match a given three-dimensional (3D) blueprint. Constructing mounds around landing pads will provide physical shielding from debris during launch/landing. Burying a human habitat modules under 0.5 m of lunar regolith is expected to provide both radiation shielding and maintain temperatures of −25 °C. This minimizes base life-support complexity and reduces launch mass. ANT is compelling for a lunar mission because it does not require a team of astronauts for excavation and it requires minimal supervision. The robot teams are shown to autonomously interpret blueprints, excavate and prepare sites for a lunar base. Because little pre-programmed knowledge is provided, the controllers discover creative techniques. ANT evolves techniques such as slot-dozing that would otherwise require excavation experts. This is critical in making an excavation mission feasible when it is prohibitively expensive to send astronauts. The controllers evolve elaborate negotiation behaviors to work in close quarters. These and other techniques such as concurrent evolution of the controller and team size are shown to tackle problem of antagonism, when too many robots interfere reducing the overall efficiency or worse, resulting in gridlock. Although many challenges remain with this technology, our work shows a compelling pathway for field testing this approach.

Oxytocin and Collective Bargaining: Propositions for a New Research Protocol

This paper contributes to collective bargaining research by providing a causal theoretical biological link path between negotiation behaviors and their substantive and relational results. Specifically, the role of oxytocin is described in light of the scientific knowledge that comes from organizational neurosciences, neuroeconomics and, psychology fields. The properties of the hormone, its place in neuroeconomics research and, their links with the psychology of the collective bargaining processes are discussed to determine guidelines for a new experimental protocol meant to study decision-making processes during collective bargaining. In addition, the conceptual model of strategic negotiations serves as a theoretical framework to consolidate the propositions that can be deduced from the results of the interaction processes in collective bargaining according to two dimensions of the outcome of the negotiations. Finally, the parameters of a new experimental protocol derived from the trust game are presented for the first time. This new game presents a more ecological perspective and is developed to offer a better fit with the specific domain of collective bargaining.

Understanding International Business Negotiation Behavior: Credible Commitments, Dispute Resolution, and the Role of Institutions

Developed mainly in the broad field of negotiation, the existing literature on international business negotiation has adopted theoretical perspectives that focus on differences between negotiating parties. In this article, we argue that opportunism is more fundamental than differences in our understanding of international business negotiation behavior. Parties’ concerns over how to mitigate opportunism are the fundamental force that drives such negotiation behavior, and the likelihood of opportunism is affected mostly by the economic nature of the asset parties committed to the business exchange. By synthesizing transaction cost economics and new institutional economics, this paper develops an alternative theoretical model that complements the existing negotiation literature to explain negotiation behavior. Our model theorizes relationships between parties’ ex-ante credible commitments and ex-post dispute resolution strategies and explores how institutions moderate such relationships in shaping international business negotiation behavior and process.

Designing the Widget

The Widget design task is an in-class, experiential exercise that affords students the opportunity to develop interpersonal skills in group negotiation. Students engage in new product design in committees of two dyads where one dyad represents Consumer Research and the other represents Strategic Management. Task information creates different perspectives and requires committees to negotiate decisions about 10 Widget attributes. The exercise is applicable to courses focusing on negotiation, work teams, and myriad other organizational behavior topics (e.g., conflict, power, communication) where interactive activities are desirable to help students develop negotiation soft skills. The exercise is adaptable to work within a 75- or 50-minute class period, and can be enhanced using measures, inventories, or assignments completed outside of class time.

The output costs of hard and soft sovereign default

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between “hard” and “soft” defaults, using new data on debtor payment and negotiation behavior and on the size of haircuts towards private external creditors. We show that hard defaults are associated with a much steeper drop in GDP, of up to ten percent, compared to soft defaults. The results are consistent with theoretical models assuming proportional output costs of default.

Understanding trust development in negotiations: An interdependent approach

SummaryWhat affects the way that trust develops in negotiations? In two studies, we used an actor–partner interdependence model to investigate how both negotiators' trust propensity prior to the negotiation and two types of behavior during the negotiation affect negotiators' trust development. Study 1 demonstrated that both focal negotiators' (actors') and their counterparts' (partners') trust propensity were positively associated with negotiators' trust development. Study 2 showed that actors' and partners' trust propensity had an indirect effect on trust development via both actors' and partners' negotiation behaviors. Negotiators' trust propensity positively affected their use of Q&A (questions and answers about interests) and negatively affected their use of S&O (substantiation about positions and single‐issue offers). Actors and partners' negotiation behaviors in turn affected their own and their partners' trust development. Our studies propose and test a model to understand how negotiators' trust propensity and negotiation behaviors affect the development of trust in negotiation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Male Immorality: An Evolutionary Account of Sex Differences in Unethical Negotiation Behavior

Past research has found that men negotiate more unethically than women, although many studies report comparable rates of unethical negotiation behaviors. Based on evolutionary psychology, we predic...

Islamic values and negotiator behavior

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine whether and how the fundamental Islamic values of Arab Muslim business negotiators influence their views of the negotiation process and negotiation behavior. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on an interpretive qualitative approach. The data were obtained by semi-structured interviews. The participants were managers whose role entails negotiations as an essential component of their job. Findings For Arab Muslim negotiators, the use of knowledge is associated with a moral imperative of being truthful and using knowledge responsibly. The virtues of honesty, transparency, trust, integrity, fairness, peace, respect and concern for the counterpart’s negotiation outcomes emerged as important considerations for Arab Muslim negotiators. Research limitations/implications All the research participants were from an Arab Islamic country. Empirical data obtained from non-Arab Islamic respondents can provide further insights into how religious beliefs shape negotiation behavior of Muslim negotiators. Practical implications The international negotiation practitioners involved in cross-cultural negotiations in the Arabian Gulf should consider their counterpart’s behavioral patterns and expectations shaped by the Islamic faith. Appreciating what matters to an Arab Muslim negotiator will increase the probability of a positive negotiation experience and the likelihood of attaining negotiation goals. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on innovative management practices by emphasizing the need to broaden the knowledge of a cultural perspective of management innovation. Innovative interventions in intercultural negotiations should include a consideration of the counterparts’ religious beliefs in both intra- and inter-firm bargaining situations.

Psychological Contract Development, Distributive Justice, and Performance of Independent Contractors

In today’s “gig economy,” more and more jobs are offered to independent contractors. Independent contractors have a highly defined, narrow, finite set of obligations to their employing organizations. As such, independent contractors gain the benefit of flexibility, choosing who and when they work, and organizations gain the benefit of nimbleness, expanding, and contracting their workforce at will without taking on the robust obligations they must typically offer to a full-time employee. As this sector of the U.S. economy grows, how our existing theories of employee–employer relationships apply is of interest. The present study sought to explore how one such theory (psychological contract theory) manifests in the independent contractor–organization relationship. Drawing on this theory’s findings with respect to key antecedents of an employment relationship, we explore how particular types of negotiation behavior an organization uses with an independent contractor affect the resources allocated to the independent contractor, vis-à-vis obligations that the independent contractor feels that the focal organization should fulfill (psychological contract). These resources are hypothesized to directly relate to the independent contractor’s sense of distributive justice, as well as the contracting organization’s evaluation of the independent contractor’s performance. Overall, the mixed results suggest that psychological contract theory can be applied to the context of the independent contractor–organization relationship in order to uncover how unique features of the relationship (e.g., highly negotiated terms) affect how obligations are created and reciprocated between the parties. Psychological contract type appears to be a partial linchpin between an organization’s negotiation behaviors on independent contractor performance.

Recommendations for Framing Multi‐Stakeholder Tradespace Exploration

AbstractTradespace exploration is a rapidly advancing design and decision support paradigm that is particularly applicable to complex systems with many value‐driving dimensions. These systems commonly have multiple stakeholders that can exert critical influence on the system's conceptual design, necessitating the satisfaction of their needs, and often requiring negotiation. Previous research has suggested that classic tradespace exploration activities may reinforce negative negotiation behaviors through their framing of the multi‐stakeholder problem. This paper presents active research in recommendations for supporting inter‐stakeholder and stakeholder‐data interaction. These recommendations include the reframing of standard tradespace activities and visualizations using the combined insights of the negotiation, framing, and TSE literature and extend from problem formulation through exploration of the data.

Walking in My Shoes: How Expectations of Role Reversal in Future Negotiations Affect Present Behaviors

The authors focus on repeated distributive negotiations to investigate how expectations of role reversal in future transactions (i.e., a buyer [seller] in one transaction is the seller [buyer] in the next transaction) affect behaviors in the current negotiation. They demonstrate that when negotiators expect a role reversal, they are likely to make more concessions and reach agreement more quickly in the current negotiation. The authors find that this effect is driven by negotiators’ beliefs that they will be able to recover these concessions, because negotiators expect their counterparts to reciprocate in the later transaction when the parties reverse roles. However, when the two negotiations occur in different “accounting” periods (i.e., fiscal periods) or when the negotiating parties do not explicitly communicate their willingness to reverse roles in the future, role-reversal expectations do not affect concession making. Implications arise in both managerial and consumer contexts where the possibility of engaging in future negotiations—as well as reversing roles—exists.

Cooperation in multicultural negotiations: How the cultures of people with low and high power interact.

This study examined whether the cultures of low- and high-power negotiators interact to influence cooperative behavior of low-power negotiators. Managers from 4 different cultural groups (Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, and the United States) negotiated face-to-face in a simulated power-asymmetric commons dilemma. Results supported an interaction effect in which cooperation of people with lower power was influenced by both their culture and the culture of the person with higher power. In particular, in a multicultural setting, low-power managers from Hong Kong, a vertical-collectivist culture emphasizing power differences and group alignment, adjusted their cooperation depending on the culture of the high-power manager with whom they interacted. This study contributes to understanding how culture shapes behavior of people with relatively low power, illustrates how a logic of appropriateness informs cooperation, and highlights the importance of studying multicultural social interactions in the context of negotiations, work teams, and global leadership. (PsycINFO Database Record

Deal or no deal? The effect of alcohol drinking on bargaining

Alcohol drinking during business negotiation is a very common practice, particularly in some East Asian countries. Does alcohol consumption affect negotiator's strategy and consequently the outcome of the negotiation? If so, what is the mechanism through which alcohol impacts negotiator's behavior? We investigate the effect of a moderate amount of alcohol on negotiation using controlled experiments. Subjects are randomly matched into pairs to play a bargaining game with adverse selection. In the game, each subject is given a private endowment. The total endowment is scaled up and shared equally between the pair provided that they agree to collaborate. It is found that a moderate amount of alcohol consumption increases subjects’ willingness to collaborate, thus improving their average payoff. We find that alcohol consumption increases neither subjects’ preference for risk nor altruism. A possible explanation for the increase in the likelihood of collaboration is that subjects under the influence of alcohol are more “cursed” in the sense of Eyster and Rabin (2005), which is supported by the estimation results of a structural model of quantal response equilibrium.

Your Gain My Pain? The Effects of Accounting Information in Uncertain Negotiations

Prior studies on buyer-supplier negotiations show that refined accounting information can enhance negotiation processes and outcomes. We extend these studies by considering the influence of uncertainty, which is commonly present during negotiations. Uncertainty increases friction between negotiators as they take different reference points, exacerbating the level of conflict. We theorize that refined accounting information, even when unrelated to the source of uncertainty, helps to limit its adversarial effects on behavior and outcomes by enabling negotiators to identify mutually beneficial tradeoffs. We develop an experiment in which 89 dyads of buyers and suppliers participate to test our expectations about how uncertainty interacts with accounting information in affecting negotiation behavior and outcomes. Results show that uncertainty reduces negotiators’ use of integrative tactics relative to distributive tactics, which in turn negatively influences joint profit. Refined accounting information, however, weakens the negative impact of uncertainty on behavior, mitigating the negative impact on joint profit.

Partnership-Level Analysis of African American Women's Risky Sexual Behavior in Main and Non-Main Partnerships.

The majority of research on risky sexual behavior in African American women has examined global associations between individual-level predictors and behavior. However, this method obscures the potentially significant impact of the specific relationship or relationship partner on risky sexual behavior. To address this gap, we conducted partnership-level analysis of risky sexual behavior among 718 African American women recruited from HIV counseling, testing, and referral sites in four states. Using mixed model regressions, we tested relationships between condomless vaginal intercourse with men and variables drawn from the Theory of Planned Behavior, Theory of Gender and Power, and previous research specifically on sexual risks among African American women. Significant associations with risky sexual behavior indicate the need for continued emphasis on condom attitudes, condom negotiation behaviors, and overcoming partner resistance to condoms within both main and non-main partnerships when implementing interventions designed to address HIV and sexually transmitted infection risks among African American women.

Why can’t we settle again? Analysis of factors that influence agreement prospects in the post-settlement phase

Negotiators often settle for inefficient agreements and therefore potentially leave substantial value at the bargaining table. Scholars recommend the use of a post-settlement negotiation and its support to give negotiators the opportunity to engage in Pareto-improvement steps. While negotiators can only benefit from reaching a post-settlement agreement, prior research reports low agreement-rates in post-settlement negotiations. This study identifies factors that potentially influence the likelihood of reaching a post-settlement agreement. Based on a laboratory experiment, we show that the prospects of reaching a post-settlement agreement depend on the gender of the negotiators, their mutual understanding in terms of language proficiency, their engagement in the post-settlement phase and the ‘integrativeness’ of the initial agreement. Furthermore, our results show that during post-settlement activities, negotiators seem to focus rather on an extension than on a reallocation of welfare gains. The results of this study provide a better understanding of negotiation behavior, theoretical and practical implications and assistance to designers of negotiation support systems for improving the fit between users’ requirements and available support functionalities.

Ethical reasoning in business‐to‐business negotiations: evidence from relationships in the chemical industry in Germany

This article explores managers’ ethical reasoning for behaviors in price negotiations using evidence from 15 in‐depth interviews conducted with sales and purchasing representatives in the chemical industry in Germany. Applying transaction cost economics, we find that negotiators in commoditized market‐like exchanges either refer to deontological norms such as not to lie, or they neglect a role for ethics, arguing that distributive negotiation is per se opportunistic. In contrast, exchanges of products with higher asset specificity lead to stronger informational integration which is supported with teleological justifications. Some negotiators use teleological justification to build business on trust rather than on economic safeguards as their firm norms would require. For negotiators, our results suggest considering institutional context and adjusting ethical reasoning to the negotiation situation. Firms need to recognize and find ways to address the potential conflicts of their internal norms with their frontline managers’ attempts to act in the firms’ best economic and ethical interests.

Determinants of complexity of sovereign debt negotiation

IntroductionThe recent negotiation with Greece and other cases of external indebtedness of developing and developed countries remind about unsolved challenges of sovereign debt management. Frequently, the decisive part of sovereign debt management is its restructuring, which is achieved in the long lasting and complex, multi-party negotiation.While there exists a vast literature about international debt, the negotiation process itself has usually been given less attention. Most of the studies are focused upon formal aspects of negotiation, e.g. modelling the bargaining process with dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model. Such problems as the process of negotiation, bargaining phases, behavior of negotiators, structure of negotiation situation, the consequences of multi-actor negotiation have not yet been studied profoundly.There is another aspect of the situation on all financial markets which is associated with their increasing complexity. It is reflected in variety of applications of that term in the public discourse on finance, including also sovereign debt. Negotiation of sovereign debt is by definition a complex endeavor. Its complexity results both from structural characteristics - number of actors, problems of coordination, communication, cooperation and conflict as well as from cognitive boundaries. Recently, complexity of debt restructuring negotiation has even increased due to overall uncertainty in the world economic system and due to new specific determinants of the debt restructuring cases, e.g. the Greece's debt crisis. The survey of literature on sovereign debt management shows that no research has been done on complexity of the sovereign debt management, and sovereign debt negotiation in particular.The aim of the paper is to provide initial framework concepts of complexity of sovereign debt restructuring negotiation referring to a universal collection of characteristics of negotiation. A model of debt restructuring negotiation is elaborated and the set of complexity-related characteristics of negotiation is proposed.Although the term complexity is frequently used in the discourse on negotiation, including debt restructuring negotiation, usually it is defined in an imprecise manner. Therefore the definitions of complexity are explained in the paper in a more rigorous way. The ideas presented in the paper can be used in a deeper understanding of the sovereign debt negotiating processes, their institutional determinants and behavior of the parts involved. The approaches based solely upon statistical analysis and rational assumptions about decision makers are insufficient, especially under the contemporary circumstances.In the first part of the paper, sovereign debt and negotiation associated with its restructuring are discussed. Definitions of 'hard' and 'soft' complexity are presented in the second part. In the third part, the structure and the process of debt restructuring negotiation are depicted. In the final part the attributes of complexity of debt restructuring negotiation are proposed. Potential applications of complexity-related ideas drawn from theory of negotiations are also scrutinized in the last part.1.Sovereign debt negotiation: A descriptive approach1.1.Sovereign debt and its restructuringSovereign debt (public / government / national debt) is issued by a national government. It is theoretically considered to be risk-free, as the government can employ different measures to guarantee repayment, e.g. to increase taxes or to print money. Government debt can embody internal debt (owed to lenders within the country) and external debt (owed to foreign lenders).In practice, there have been multiple cases in which governments could not serve their debt obligations and had to default. As a consequence, investors ask for different yields across countries. The more a country's repayment ability is in question and the riskier sovereign debt becomes, the higher is its yield. …

The Output Costs of Hard and Soft Sovereign Default

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between “hard” and “soft” defaults, using new data on debtor payment and negotiation behavior and on the size of haircuts towards private external creditors. We show that hard defaults are associated with a much steeper drop in GDP, of up to ten percent, compared to soft defaults, and address concerns of reverse causality and omitted variable bias. The results question the standard assumption that defaults trigger fixed and lump-sum costs. Instead, our findings are consistent with models assuming proportional output costs of default.

Dynamic Time-Dependent Strategy Model for Predicting Human’s Offer in E-Commerce Negotiation

Human-computer negotiation plays an important role in B2C e-commerce. There is a paucity of further scientific investigation and a pressing need on designing the software agent that can deal with the human’s random and dynamic offer, which is crucially useful in human-computer negotiation to achieve better online negotiation outcomes. The lack of such studies has decelerated the process of applying automated negotiation to real world applications. To address the critical issue, this paper develops a dynamic time-dependent strategy concession model, that can predict the human’s negotiation behavior during the process of the negotiation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this model, we implement a prototype and conduct human-computer negotiations over 121 subjects. The experimental analysis not only confirms our model’s effect but also reveals some insights into future work about human-computer negotiation systems.