Roger Fisher, one of the cofounders of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Samuel Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus, was honored on the 8th of April with a celebration of his career, research, and contributions to both the HLS community and the field of negotiation.
Negotiation Process
The following items are tagged Negotiation Process.
Bargaining at a Fever Pitch: A Bold Bid
Have you ever won an auction only to realize later that you overbid for the prize? In competitive bidding situations, it’s easy to get carried away in the heat of the moment and overpay.
The Darker Side of Perspective Taking
Many negotiation experts recommend that you try to take the other party’s perspective, particularly when attempting to resolve disputes.
Recent research by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Eugene Caruso and Max Bazerman of Harvard University suggests a dark side to this generally sound negotiation advice. The researchers ran a series of experiments in which they asked participants to determine the fair division of a scarce resource. Half of the subjects (the “self-focused condition”) were asked how much would be fair for them to take. The other subjects (the “other-focused” condition) were asked to think about what would be fair for others to take and then write down how much would be fair for each party (not just themselves) to take.
Team Building: For Strength in Numbers, Build a Strong Team
An energy boom has hit the rural counties of the upper Ohio River Valley, resulting in a flood of investment in mineral leasing that is revitalizing economies and creating newfound prosperity for many landowners, Keith Schneider reported in the New York Times on June 4.
Resolving the First-Offer Dilemma in Business Negotiations
Should you make the first offer? Few questions related to negotiation have yield more academic attention and debate among practitioners.
Getting Off on the Wrong Foot
Sometimes negotiators get off on the wrong foot. Maybe you and your partner had a different understanding of your meeting time, or one of you makes a statement that the other misinterprets. Such awkward moves at the beginning of an interaction can lead one party to question the other side’s motives.
In a recent article, Robert Lount, Chen-Bo Zhong, J. Keith Murnighan, and Niro Sivanathan, all of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, examined trust building in negotiation.
Accounting for Outsiders in Your Negotiations
If you’re in the middle of talks that seem to be going well, here’s a warning: consider the impact of the agreement on those who aren’t at the table, or suffer the consequences. That’s a lesson that Apple and some of the largest U.S. book publishers are currently learning the hard way.
On April 12, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Apple and five major U.S. publishers for colluding to raise the price of e-books during secretive, anti-competitive negotiations. Three of the publishers have settle the suit; two others and Apple have so far been unwilling to settle.
Planting the Seeds of Peace
Tucked away in an idyllic corner of Maine is a summer camp that features many traditional American activities: singing around bonfires, flag raising ceremonies, Color Wars, and chilly dips in the lake. Less ordinary, however, are the daily dialogue sessions, where Israeli and Palestinian campers heatedly discuss their identities, homelands, politics, and pain.
Meet Seeds of Peace, the organization that runs this one-of-a-kind camp – and our client organization for a very unique clinical project. We – Krystyna Wamboldt (JD ’12), Rachel Krol (JD ’12), and Professor Robert Bordone (JD ’97) – partnered with Seeds of Peace to lead a skills-building workshop for the organization’s older youth, focused on interests-based, problem-solving negotiation.
As part of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP), our three person team traveled to Jerusalem in January 2012 to teach negotiation and mediation skills to a group of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, all former campers at Seeds of Peace. For three days, the “Seeds” did a range of activities, including several role-plays and active listening exercises. On the final day of the program, the students put their new skills to use in a group negotiation simulation about the conflict in Northern Ireland.
“It was incredible to look around the room and see both Palestinian and Israelis working together during the Ireland simulation,” said Rachel. “It was a challenging negotiation, yet they were communicating effectively, asking questions, listening to each other, and asserting their own interests while working towards a common goal. It was a wonderful sight!”
Negotiate How You’ll Negotiate
When a negotiation ends, our satisfaction with the final outcome doesn’t depend solely on how much we objectively gained or lost, according to research by Jared Curhan and Hen Xu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hillary Anger Elfenbein of the University of California at Berkeley. In fact, negotiator satisfaction hinges on four factors: our
Are You Talking to the Right Person?
When someone is reluctant to engage in negotiation, you might try to wear her down until she finally caves in. Before you risk becoming a pest, however, ask yourself a critical question: Am I talking to the right person?
When negotiators fail to map out the negotiation process in advance, they can encounter detours and dead









