Adapted from “Putting More on the Table: How Making Multiple Offers Can Increase the Final Value of the Deal,” by Victoria Husted Medvec and Adam D. Galinsky (professors, Northwestern University), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Suppose you open talks with an important customer by making an aggressive first offer. He becomes offended. You back off … Read Put More on the Table 
James K. Sebenius (Program on Negotiation Executive Committee Vice-Chair; Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Co-author of 3-D Negotiation)
Negotiators are often too confident of their own position and too quick to demonize the other side. In this article, the author describes steps to conquer these damaging biases.
Read More … Read More
PON Executive Committee member Professor Lawrence Susskind was awarded the first Kenneth Cloke Peacemaker Award for outstanding and lasting contributions in International Peacebuilding at the Mediators Beyond Borders annual conference.
To learn more about the award, click here.
To learn more about Mediators Beyond Borders, click here. … Read More
Adapted from “When Your Thoughts Work Against You,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Remember the firestorm that the cover of The New Yorker magazine’s July 21, 2008, issue created? The cartoon depicted presidential nominee Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in the Oval Office, he dressed as a flag-burning Muslim, she as a terrorist.
It wasn’t … Read Consider the Source
Ayed Morrar, an unlikely community organizer, unites Palestinians from all political factions and Israelis to save his village from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. Victory seems improbable until his 15-year-old daughter, Iltezam, launches a women’s contingent that quickly moves to the front lines.
Struggling side by side, father and daughter unleash an inspiring, yet little-known movement … Read Budrus
Max H. Bazerman (Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School) and Deepak Malhotra (Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School)
Negotiations can hit a brick wall because one party wrongly assumes they understand the other side’s motivations and therefore don’t explore them further. In this article, the authors discuss five principles underlying … Read Investigative Negotiation
Faculty discuss the principles of negotiation they teach in the Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives.
To learn more about PON’s Executive Education courses, click here.
To see more PON negotiation videos, click here. … Read More
PON Executive Committee member Jeswald Salacuse published a column in the Winter 2011 issue of Tufts Magazine.
“Opening Moves: They Can Make or Break Any Deal” suggests that how a negotiation ends can be directly affected by how the negotiation begins.
Before entering a negotiation, he suggests you consider these three factors: 1) Your options; 2) The … Read More
Adapted from “Coping with Culture at the Bargaining Table,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
As if intercultural negotiations weren’t complicated enough, you may find yourself facing a language barrier. Whenever one party doesn’t speak the other party’s language well, you should consider hiring a translator (or one for each language, if necessary).
The presence of translators … Read Don’t get Lost in Translation
Ehud Eiran, an affiliate of the Program on Negotiation and former fellow who is currently a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and a lecturer at MIT, published an article in Ha’aretz about the relationship between the United States and Egypt titled “What Makes Alliance … Read More
Adapted from “In Negotiation, How Much Do Personality and Other Individual Differences Matter?” First published in the Negotiation newsletter.
When you criticize a negotiator’s arguments or question her motives, you risk threatening her “face,” or social image. Such direct threats to self-esteem can trigger embarrassment, anger, and competitive behavior in your counterpart, according to research … Read Why it Pays to Save Face
Lawrence Susskind (Ford professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology; author of Built to Win; co-author of Breaking Robert’s Rules and Breaking the Impasse)
A new theory for generating and justifying decisions builds on a solid foundation of negotiation principles. In this posting, the author describes the reasoning behind collaborative rationality and … Read Collaborative Rationality
