During the past several years, one scandalous story of unethical behavior after another has made headlines: Countrywide’s and AIG’s risky business practices, trader Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s alleged attempt to sell a U.S. Senate seat. As instances of people behaving badly proliferate, some commentators have wondered if we are … Read Negotiators: Guard Against Ethical Lapses 

On June 19, Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a libertarian, teamed up with two liberal Democrats, Zoe Lofgren of California and Rush D. Holt of New Jersey, to push through an amendment that places new prohibitions on the National Security Agency and the CIA’s surveillance operations, including barring the agencies from engaging in warrantless … Learn More About This Program 

Adapted from “Coping with Culture at the Bargaining Table,” first published in the May 2009 issue of Negotiation.
Why we focus on culture
Why does concentrating on the other side’s culture lead to problems in negotiation? Consider that negotiators often focus too narrowly on the most obvious information about the task at hand. Such focusing failures lead negotiators to … Read Why We Focus on Culture in Negotiations 

You’ve probably grown accustomed to seeing people not-so-discreetly checking messages on their smartphones or laptops during meetings. Maybe you’ve even been guilty of this yourself.
Paying more attention to a phone than to the person in front us is clearly rude in most situations. Could it also affect how well we negotiate? Researchers Aparna Krishnan and … Learn More About This Program 

At this point, you have entered the realm of haggling: the dance of concessions that follows each party’s first offer. (In our TV negotiation, the $1,100 list price was the store’s first offer.)

For some, this is where the real fun begins; for others, it’s time of great anxiety. To manage your stress, keep your BATNA … Learn More About This Program 

In the early 1990s, NASA managers and engineers were warned by an expert in risk
analysis that the heat-resistant tiles that protected space shuttles during reentry into Earth’s
atmosphere could be damaged by debris from the insulating foam on the shuttle’s’ fuel tanks.

During missions over the next 10 years, debris did, indeed, hit tiles, but the damage … Learn More About This Program 

The story, related by an anonymous job candidate on a blog called the Philosophy Smoker, went viral. According to the job candidate, referred to only as “W,” the philosophy department of Nazareth College, a small liberal-arts college in Rochester, New York, offered her a tenure-track position following a round of interviews. W said she responded … Read Is your negotiating style holding you back? 

The Consensus Building Institute (CBI) based in Boston, Massachusetts and in Washington, DC has honored Program on Negotiation faculty member Lawrence Susskind with its creation of a one-year graduate student fellowship that offers the successful candidate the opportunity to work with CBI in Boston or DC on an area of focus for bot CBI and … Learn More About This Program 

On May 30, the National Basketball Association (NBA) announced it had approved former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s record-breaking $2 billion offer to buy the Los Angeles Clippers from Shelly Sterling, wife of Clippers owner Donald Sterling. In April, the NBA banned Sterling from the league for life after racist remarks he made during a phone … Learn More About This Program 

The Program on Negotiation has awarded Eugene B. Kogan the 2014 Howard Raiffa Doctoral Student Paper Award for his paper “Coercing Allies: Why Friends Abandon Nuclear Plans.” This paper was submitted as his thesis for the Ph.D. program at Brandeis. Mr. Kogan is currently a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Security Program at … Learn More About This Program