In mid-May, about a month after the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15, lawyer and mediator Kenneth Feinberg stood in an auditorium at the Boston Public Library to address families who had been directly impacted by the tragedy. Feinberg was in charge of administering One Fund Boston, a fund created to distribute donations to the victims.
agent
A person who acts on a principal’s behalf in a negotiation. Agents – such as lawyers, sports agents, or diplomats – may have special training or be able to assert the principal’s interests more effectively than the principal. (Michael L. Moffitt and Robert C. Bordone, eds., Handbook of Dispute Resolution [Program on Negotiation/Jossey-Bass, 2005], 189). Also see “principal-agent theory.”
The following items are tagged agent.
Deal Making Without a Net: Yahoo’s Tumblr Acquisition
On May 19, Internet company Yahoo announced that it was purchasing the blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash. The acquisition could put a fresh face on the aging Internet company and provide it with a profitable revenue source—or it could turn out to be another instance of the Web pioneer overpaying for a start-up and failing to nurture it, as was the case after Yahoo bought Flickr and GeoCities.
Trust in Negotiations
Trust may develop naturally over time, but negotiators rarely have the luxury of letting nature take its course. Thus it sometimes seems easiest to play it safe with cautious deals involving few tradeoffs, few concessions, and little information sharing between parties. But avoiding risk can mean missing out on significant opportunities. For this reason, fostering trust on the fly is a critical skill for managers. As Kristen knew, the first step to inspiring trust is to demonstrate trustworthiness. All negotiators can apply the six strategies that follow to influence others’ perceptions of their trustworthiness at the bargaining table.
5 Tips for Closing the Deal
What to do when you’ve done everything right, but you still don’t have an agreement.
Working with Your Agent – and Someone Else’s – In Negotiation
Negotiations become especially complex when agents are involved on two or more sides.
In the course, of their research, Robert Mnookin and Lawrence Susskind discovered that many negotiators often mistakenly assume that an agent representing the other side
Using Agents Effectively in Negotiation
Once you’ve decided to use an agent, it’s important not to rush headlong into the process – picking the first one you speak to, for example, and sending him off to talks the next day.
You need to choose your agent carefully, then establish a clear, detailed understanding of each other’s responsibilities and expectations.
The following are critical steps in picking an agent and negotiating his contract.
When to Use Agents in Negotiation
The Program on Negotiation has identified three basic sets of circumstances in which you’ll be better off tapping an agent to take your place at the bargaining table (at least for part of the negotiating process).
Strategies for Negotiating More Rationally
In past articles, we have highlighted a variety of psychological biases that affect negotiators, many of which spring from a reliance on intuition.
Of course, negotiators are not always affected by bias; we often think systematically and clearly at the bargaining table.
Managing Status in Negotiation
Concerns about status will arise in any negotiation. How can you deal with them, both in yourself and in others? The following six guidelines can help in virtually any context
To Improve Your Negotiation Skills, Learn from a Pro
On February 16, in the midst of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) All-Star weekend, members of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) unanimously voted to oust Billy Hunter as the union’s executive director.
“This is our union and we have taken it back,” National Basketball Players Association president Derek Fisher said, as reported by ESPN.com. Fisher said the union had been “divided, misled, [and] misinformed,” by its leader. Hunter hinted in a statement that he might contest his firing in court.









