Teaching Negotiation

Teaching negotiation includes instructional areas such as deal setup and design, dispute resolution systems, arbitration, mediation, and meeting facilitation as well as the use of interactive role-play exercises, books, videos, training materials and role-play simulations designed around a specific negotiation skill or concept. The Program on Negotiation’s educational resource center, known as the Teaching Negotiation Resource Center (TNRC), develops a wide-range of role-play simulations—including the popular Sally Soprano negotiation case study—interactive teaching exercises, books, videos, and scholarly papers devoted to the application of teaching negotiation and training effective negotiators.

Materials in the TNRC cover negotiation-related issues in areas ranging from climate change to ethics. Many of the themes are substantive (e.g., environmental negotiations or business negotiations), some target specific sectors (e.g., health care industry), or address particular contexts (e.g., cross-cultural negotiation skills) while others are more process oriented (e.g., facilitation).

The most popular simulation topics include:

  • Environmental
  • Real Estate
  • Workplace
  • Public Policy
  • Teaching in Law
  • Water Management Simulations

In addition, once a year, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School selects an outstanding individual who embodies what it means to be a truly great negotiator. To earn the Great Negotiator Award, the honoree must be a distinguished leader whose lifelong accomplishments in the field of dispute resolution and negotiation have had compelling and lasting results.

To help students and professionals learn valuable lessons from these highly skilled negotiators, PON’s Great Negotiator Case Study Series features in-depth studies such as Stuart Eizenstat: Negotiating the Final Accounts of World War II and Lakhdar Brahimi: Negotiating a New Government for Afghanistan.

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Sally Soprano All-In-One Curriculum Package is Now Available!

Lara SanPietro   •  07/01/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

New to Teaching Negotiation? 
If you are new to teaching negotiation or are looking to go in-depth on the fundamental negotiation concepts, the Sally Soprano All-In-One Curriculum Package will provide you with everything you need to teach negotiation.

Sally Soprano, one of the Teaching Negotiation Resource Center’s most popular simulations, is a two-party negotiation between the agent … Learn More About This Program

Bakra Beverage All-In-One Curriculum Package is Now Available!

Lara SanPietro   •  06/13/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

All-In-One

New to Teaching Negotiation?
If you are new to teaching negotiation or are looking to go in-depth on the fundamental negotiation concepts, the Bakra Beverage All-In-One Curriculum Package will provide you with everything you need to teach negotiation.

Bakra Beverage, one of the Teaching Negotiation Resource Center’s most popular simulations, is a two-party negotiation between a beverage manufacturer and a … Learn More About This Program

Ask A Negotiation Expert: Trends in Merger and Acquisition Strategies

PON Staff   •  05/31/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

merger and acquisition strategies

We recently spoke with Guhan Subramanian, the Joseph H. Flom Professor of Law and Business at Harvard Law School and the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, regarding trends in merger and acquisition strategies and how that’s impacting negotiations. 

Negotiation Briefings: In your research, you’ve found that the way in which … Learn More About This Program

Teaching Critical Leadership Skills

Lara SanPietro   •  05/13/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

ethical leadership and Effective Leadership as portrayed by people standing on a rock with their fists in the air Participative Leadership

Running a multinational corporation, starting a small business, or leading a diplomatic mission all require critical leadership skills. Being an effective leader necessitates negotiating both within your organization and with external partners. In Real Leaders Negotiate, author Jeswald Salacuse explains that leaders can increase their effectiveness by using negotiation in each of the three phases … Read Teaching Critical Leadership Skills

Howard Raiffa Taught Us About Decision-Making and Negotiation

PON Staff   •  03/21/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

decision making and negotiation

If you’ve ever made a decision tree, engaged in risk analysis, or created a scoring system when preparing for a negotiation, you benefited from the work of economist Howard Raiffa, whether you realized it or not. And the decisions you’ve made in your negotiations likely have been far smarter as a result. After all, decision-making … Learn More About This Program

Dear Negotiation Coach: How Can You De-bias Job Negotiations?

PON Staff   •  01/11/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

job negotiations

In many organizations, policies and systems perpetuate gender and racial discrimination and inequality, including higher pay for white men as compared to others for the same work. Harvard Kennedy School professor Iris Bohnet, the author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design (Belknap Press, 2016), overviews steps professionals can take to promote wiser, more equitable … Learn More About This Program

Dear Negotiation Coach: Does Communication Style Matter in Negotiation?

PON Staff   •  01/04/2022   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

communication style

We recently spoke with Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino about communication style in negotiations. The question arises frequently of whether you can achieve better results with a tough, no nonsense approach or through a coming across as more approachable and warm. The reality is more nuanced, however, as Professor Gino describes.

Teaching Negotiation

Claim your FREE copy: Teaching Negotiation

Discover the insights you need to deliver the most effective role-play simulations in this free special report, Teaching Negotiation: Understanding The Impact Of Role-Play Simulations, from Harvard Law School.


NB: In your research, … Learn More About This Program

Ask A Negotiation Expert: Making Our Good Negotiation Skills Even Better

PON Staff   •  12/06/2021   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

good negotiation skills

We recently spoke to Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler about the challenges and opportunities of learning good negotiation skills from our real life bargaining situations. Wheeler is the author of The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and the “Negotiation 360” preparation app, which is … Learn More About This Program

The Value of Using Scorable Simulations in Negotiation Training

Lara SanPietro   •  11/18/2021   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

At a Teaching Negotiation Resource Center (TNRC) faculty pedagogy seminar, members of the PON faculty and negotiation community gathered to hear Gordon Kaufman (MIT Morris A. Adelman Professor of Management, Emeritus) speak about how he uses quantifiable data to plot student-learning trajectories. The conversation focused on the ongoing debate within the negotiation pedagogy community regarding the way … Learn More About This Program

New Simulation: Having Difficult Conversations Over Email

Lara SanPietro   •  10/29/2021   •  Filed in Teaching Negotiation

email negotiation

Negotiating over email has its own unique challenges and opportunities. For example, people often assume that the emails they have sent are read immediately and so experience anxiety when there isn’t a prompt response, failing to account for reasonable delays. On the other hand, email negotiations also provide a permanent record of what is discussed … Learn More About This Program

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