We had the opportunity to speak with Alison Wood Brooks, O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, about a question concerning how to express thanks for concessions in negotiations. Here’s the original question:

Q: This may sound like a trivial question, but it’s been bothering me. When my negotiation counterparts make a favorable concession or give me something I want, I find myself holding back from thanking them. I worry that saying thank you may put me in a position of weakness. On the other hand, I don’t want to be perceived as unappreciative of their willingness to cooperate. What do you recommend?

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A: First of all, thank you for this question, which is less trivial than it may first seem. Let’s start by reflecting on gratitude, a positive emotion.

Feeling grateful is nearly synonymous with happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction. And expressing gratitude to others increases social closeness, liking, and perceptions of similarity. Numerous negotiation experts have stressed the power of expressing appreciation and showing gratitude for concessions in negotiations as a way of inspiring cooperation and reciprocation.

Despite the abundant benefits of gratitude, we also need to consider when and why expressing gratitude might have negative consequences, especially in a culture where saying thank you has become routine.

In my research with Jeremy A. Yip, Kelly Kiyeon Lee, and Cindy Chan, I investigated how saying thank you influences outcomes in negotiations. Across five experimental studies in the lab and field, we found that people who received grateful messages in single-issue, distributive negotiations made more aggressive counteroffers than did people who received neutral messages from their counterparts. This was the case because those who expressed gratitude were perceived as more agreeable—that is, more tolerant and forgiving—which led their negotiation partners to take advantage of them by acting more aggressively.

Importantly, avoiding the phrase “thank you” did not influence the rate of impasse. This finding suggests that the harmful effect of expressing gratitude on performance is driven by a higher willingness to take advantage of a grateful counterpart rather than a decreased willingness to interact with a counterpart who omits a thank you. In addition, these findings were not just about the words thank you or even about negotiation behavior. Negotiators were also more willing to take advantage of grateful counterparts after reading an online profile in which the counterpart described himself as a “grateful person” who is “thankful for all the people in my life.”

In our study, hearing the words thank you caused negotiators to make inferences and predictions about their counterpart that in turn influenced their decisions regarding making concessions in negotiations. Although grateful people are typically associated with traits that are considered to be desirable (such as friendliness) and elicit positive responses in social interactions (such as liking), expressing gratitude can be detrimental in certain types of negotiation. Why? Because negotiation is an interpersonal interaction that people often view as competitive.

Thus, whereas expressing gratitude may be a winning strategy in most social settings, saying thank you can lead to poorer performance and satisfaction in single-issue negotiations. Our findings are consistent with research by University of Amsterdam professor Gerben Van Kleef and his colleagues that suggests the inferences people make about others’ emotional expressions depend on whether the situation encourages cooperation or competition.

Notably, in our studies, reframing the negotiation in cooperative terms mitigated the effects: Receiving a gratitude expression did not increase selfish behavior in cooperative contexts.

So here’s my advice: Think about the nature of your negotiation. Have you negotiated with this person before? Will you negotiate with her again? If you are negotiating with a salesperson over the price of a new car, then saying thank you in response to any concessions in negotiations is likely to put you in a position of weakness  that the salesperson may use to claim more value—and you are likely to get a worse price.

In contrast, if you are negotiating with a business partner—someone you need to interact with in the future and care about—in a negotiation with value-creation potential, then saying thank you may be a powerful way to signal your preferences, engender trust, and improve the relationship.

What is your experience with expressing gratitude in a negotiation?

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Donald J. Trump entered the Oval Office with considerable dealmaking experience in the business world. But his blank slate as an elected official combined with his fluctuating positions on key issues such as immigration and tax policy throughout the presidential race left many wondering what his negotiating style would be.

In the months between being elected U.S. president on November 8, 2016, and taking office on January 20, 2017, Trump engaged in several negotiations that appeared to offer clues about the negotiating style he would use as negotiator-in-chief.

A Disregard for Protocol

As part of the peaceful transfer of executive power in the United States, newly elected presidents traditionally rely on State Department briefings to ensure they follow the intricate protocol involved in taking and returning congratulatory phone calls from heads of state. Calls are carefully vetted and sequenced to convey the importance of key U.S. strategic partnerships.

But in the weeks after his election, Trump took calls from world leaders in what seemed to be random order and without identity verification. For example, Trump reportedly spoke to at least nine world leaders, including the heads of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, before talking to United Kingdom prime minister Theresa May, according to the Guardian. The disregard for protocol created anxiety in Europe and fueled speculation that the Trump team was unprepared for his victory.

In another break from tradition, the tone of some of these calls was unusually casual. Rather than inviting May to visit the White House, for example, Trump asked her to let him know if she traveled to the United States. Given the complex web of relationships among the United States, India, and Pakistan, Trump’s reported enthusiastic response to Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s invitation to visit his country reportedly left Washington diplomats “slack-jawed,” according to the New York Times. And Trump’s decision to include only his daughter Ivanka Trump, who was negotiating a business deal with a Japanese-government-backed company at the time, in a brief meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe stoked criticism that the Trumps were using the presidency to advance their personal financial interests.

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A Provocative Phone Call

On December 2, 2016, President-elect Trump created a stir by taking a phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. For decades, the U.S. government had deferred to the Chinese government’s “One China” principle, which views Taiwan and China as two parts of one sovereign state. In adherence to that principle, no American president or president-elect had spoken directly to the head of Taiwan’s government since 1979.

Though many observers at first suspected Trump had accepted the phone call by mistake, it appeared to have been deliberately orchestrated by Taiwan, the New York Times reported. Working as a lobbyist for Taiwan, former senator Bob Dole coordinated with Trump’s staff to set up meetings with Taiwanese officials, Justice Department disclosure documents show. The lobbying culminated in a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan.

“By showing strength at the beginning, [Trump] may hope to gain advantages in bargaining later with the Chinese on many key issues,” professor Zhang Baohui of Lingnan University in Hong Kong told the Times. But Paul Haenle, a National Security Council staff member under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told the Washington Post that “catching China by surprise . . . presents enormous risks and potential detriment” to the Sino-American relationship.

Setting a Potential Precedent with Negotiating Style

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that, if elected, he would persuade Indiana-based Carrier Corporation to cancel its plans to outsource over 2,000 manufacturing jobs to Mexico, in part by threatening to impose stiff tariffs on Carrier and other U.S. companies that send jobs abroad.

After being elected, Trump said he was reminded of this promise when he heard a Carrier employee say on TV that he was sure his job would be safe with Trump as president, as reported by the Post. This prompted the president-elect to reach out to Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies Corp., about keeping the jobs in the United States. He assigned incoming vice president Mike Pence to negotiate the details.

State officials reportedly promised Carrier a $7 million incentive package in return for keeping the jobs of 800 workers at an Indianapolis furnace plant and investing in its plants. The company still moved 1,300 jobs to Mexico, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a 2019 Negotiation Journal article titled “Trump’s Lessons for Business Negotiators,” MIT Sloan School of Management’s Thomas Kochan writes that in the Carrier negotiation and others that followed, Trump’s negotiating style included settling for small initial concessions, as long as they were accompanied by “sufficient displays of deference that feed his ego.” Kochan continues, “Savvy business leaders will continue to give those who adopt this negotiating style what they are looking for—emotional gratification rather than substantive gains.”

Have you noticed consistency in your counterparts’ negotiating style over time, or have they exhibited different negotiation styles?

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A good negotiation agent can be hard to find. Three New York art dealers and a Russian billionaire learned that lesson the hard way in negotiations over the sale of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, as reported by Bloomberg and the New York Times.

The strange saga began in 2005, when the three dealers paid about $10,000 in an estate auction for a badly damaged painting of Jesus Christ believed to be a 16th-century work from Leonardo’s school.

One of the dealers, Old Masters specialist Robert Simon, brought the painting to art restorer Dianne Modestini in New York. Over the course of several years, Modestini painstakingly removed the varnish and overpainting of previous restoration attempts to reveal what she came to believe was Leonardo’s lost Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World—a great lost work of art. Curators at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art authenticated the discovery. The Mundi, whose first owner was believed to have been King Charles of England, had fallen in and out of sight over the centuries before being mistakenly sold as the work of another artist for just 45 pounds at Sotheby’s London in 1958.

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

One painting, two stories

After the painting was restored, Simon and his colleagues lent it to museums while spreading the word that it was for sale. The director of the Dallas Museum of Art badly wanted to buy the painting. But with the sellers asking for $150 million, the two sides remained too far apart on price, and the Mundi returned to New York, according to Bloomberg.

Then, in quick succession, two potential buyers emerged: (1) a Russian billionaire and (2) a client of Sotheby’s, Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier, who was anonymous to the sellers. The sellers set up two separate appointments.

Working on behalf of the sellers, Sotheby’s insured the Mundi for $150 million. Bouvier arranged for a Sotheby’s representative, Samuel Valette, to show the painting to him and another man at one of New York’s most expensive apartments. Sotheby’s says that it didn’t know the identity of the man who was with Bouvier; nor did the painting’s sellers.

As it turns out, that other man was the billionaire who had already scheduled a separate viewing of the Leonardo, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the lavish apartment was his home. Rybolovlev, who has amassed one of the world’s most valuable art collections, had frequently hired Bouvier as an art adviser. And Bouvier had offered to help Rybolovlev buy the Leonardo through Sotheby’s, including by advising him on price.

In fact, Bouvier reportedly planned to first buy the Leonardo himself through Sotheby’s, while hiding his identity from the sellers as an anonymous buyer. At the same time, Bouvier represented himself to Rybolovlev as his negotiation agent, allegedly tricking him into thinking that he, Rybolovlev, was buying the painting through Sotheby’s.

The art of the deal

Having seen the painting with Bouvier, Rybolovlev canceled his own scheduled viewing. The sellers thought he had dropped out of the bidding, not knowing that he thought he was buying the painting through Bouvier. That left the sellers with just Sotheby’s anonymous buyer—Bouvier.

In price negotiations in Paris that April, a mysterious agent for the anonymous buyer (Bouvier) reportedly “hammered the sellers,” driving them down from their latest asking price of $100 million, according to Bloomberg. The parties settled on $80 million, the bulk of which Bouvier paid in cash, plus a $3 million commission for Sotheby’s.

Unbeknown to the three art dealers who had just sold the Mundi, Bouvier was already scheming to resell the painting to Rybolovlev—who thought he was buying it through Sotheby’s with Bouvier acting as his negotiation agent. According to an email filed in court by Rybolovlev’s lawyers, Bouvier lied to a Rybolovlev representative that he had offered the sellers $100 million for the Leonardo on behalf of Rybolovlev but that they had turned him down “without a moment’s hesitation.” Bouvier ended up convincing Rybolovlev to pay $127.5 million—$47.5 million more than Bouvier had paid for it himself just days earlier. Rybolovlev thought he bought the painting from the trio of sellers, through Sotheby’s, when in fact he bought it from Bouvier.

Scratching beneath the surface

After Bouvier was caught allegedly flipping the Mundi, the trio of sellers were not only angry with him but also suspicious of Sotheby’s. Bouvier was a valued client of the auction house. Had Sotheby’s known of Bouvier’s plans to resell the painting for a much higher price?

Rybolovlev had similar questions. The Mundi was just one of 38 paintings his family’s trust had purchased through Bouvier, 12 of them through Sotheby’s. The billionaire has said he thought Bouvier was acting as his agent, earning a 2% commission, only to learn that he had previously skimmed up to $1 billion by buying the paintings himself and reselling them to Rybolovlev with hefty markups. Rybolovlev filed criminal charges against Bouvier in Monaco, where Bouvier was arrested in 2015 and freed on bond, the Times reports.

Denying all the accusations against him, Bouvier has said he is free to charge whatever the market will bear for a painting. Furthermore, he said that Sotheby’s didn’t know about his relationship with Rybolovlev and that the billionaire was far too sophisticated a collector to be conned into significantly overpaying for artwork, according to Bloomberg.

A private matter blows up

As for the painting’s trio of sellers, they have accused Sotheby’s of colluding with Bouvier. In court papers filed in November 2016 to try to block a lawsuit, Sotheby’s claimed it hadn’t known of its anonymous buyer’s plans to flip the Leonardo for a much higher price.

In a statement, the three art dealers who sold the Mundi accused Sotheby’s of trying to “spin their egregious behavior in the face of media scrutiny.” The dealers noted that 20 months after the sale, Sotheby’s had provided Bouvier with an insurance appraisal that valued the Leonardo at $113 million, closer to the price Rybolovlev paid than to the price Bouvier negotiated. Another instance, in which Bouvier flipped a Gustav Klimt painting to Rybolovlev after buying it through Sotheby’s, also aroused their suspicions.

Insisting they had attempted to negotiate the matter in private, the dealers now say they will try to “correct” Sotheby’s “distortions” through court actions, including suing Sotheby’s for fraud to recover the millions more they might have earned from the sale.

2 tips to avoid being taken for a ride by a negotiation agent

1. Identify conflicts of interest. Clients often assume their agents’ financial incentives are perfectly aligned with their own, but that is rarely the case. Sotheby’s, for example, may have had an incentive to get a high price for the Leonardo’s sellers to increase its commission, but it also was motivated to keep Bouvier, a repeat client, satisfied. Before hiring an agent, scrutinize her likely incentives and determine whether they are closely aligned with your own.

2. Insist on transparency. The shadowy nature of sales in the art world allowed Bouvier to misrepresent himself and his intentions to art buyers and sellers alike. You can avoid being taken advantage of in negotiation by insisting that all parties, including agents, be willing to engage in a clear and transparent process.

What issues have you encountered when using a negotiation agent?

Negotiators are often taught that the more alternatives they have, the more fortunate they are. If it’s good to have one strong best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, then it’s better to have many BATNAs, right?

Not necessarily, results from a study by Michael Schaerer of INSEAD and his colleagues show. In a series of experiments, the researchers gave participants either one alternative to their current negotiation or several. Across the studies, those who had more than one alternative perceived the bargaining zone to be less advantageous to them and made less-ambitious first offers than those who had only one alternative.

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Find out why multiple BATNAs can backfire

In one of the experiments, for example, where participants had to sell a coffee maker to another participant, the less-ambitious first offers of those with multiple BATNAs resulted in worse outcomes as compared to those with just one alternative. These results were found regardless of whether the average price of the multiple alternatives was higher (e.g., $85, $80, and $75) or lower (e.g., $75, $70, and $65) than the price in the single-alternative condition ($75).

The researchers found evidence that a range of offers serves as a more powerful anchor than a single offer in affecting our perceptions of the bargaining zone. For example, suppose that a seller is trying to negotiate the price of a coffee maker and has already secured an alternative offer of $75. This seller is likely to construe the offer of $75 as more attractive (and less likely to bargain harder) if she also has two other offers of $70 and $65 than if she has only the one offer of $75. In effect, alternatives worse than one’s BATNA, which should be irrelevant to our decision-making, anchor our expectations and first offers downward.

There are limits to this effect: The researchers found that multiple alternatives reduce first offers only when negotiators thought about their first offers in purely numeric ways (e.g., “Should I ask for $90 or $85?”), rather than more descriptively (e.g., “Should I make a moderate or high first offer?”), and lead to worse outcomes only when participants made the first offer themselves rather than responding to a counterpart’s first offer.

Don’t take these results as permission to stop looking for strong alternatives after identifying one solid BATNA, as this could lead you to end the search too early. Rather, after identifying multiple alternative BATNAs, do your best to focus on the one you value most and try to put the others out of your mind.

What’s been your experience with having multiple BATNAs?

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Q: This may sound like a trivial question, but it’s been bothering me. When my negotiation counterparts make a favorable concession or give me something I want, I find myself holding back from thanking them. I worry that saying thank you may put me in a position of weakness. On the other hand, I don’t want to be perceived as unappreciative of their willingness to cooperate. What do you recommend?

A: First of all, thank you for this question, which is less trivial than it may first seem. Let’s start by reflecting on gratitude, a positive emotion.

Feeling grateful is nearly synonymous with happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction. And expressing gratitude to others increases social closeness, liking, and perceptions of similarity. Numerous negotiation experts have stressed the power of expressing appreciation and showing gratitude as a way of inspiring cooperation and reciprocation.

Despite the abundant benefits of gratitude, we also need to consider when and why expressing gratitude might have negative consequences, especially in a culture where saying thank you has become routine.

In my recent research with Jeremy A. Yip, Kelly Kiyeon Lee, and Cindy Chan, I investigated how saying thank you influences outcomes in negotiations. Across five experimental studies in the lab and field, we found that people who received grateful messages in single-issue, distributive negotiations made more aggressive counteroffers than did people who received neutral messages from their counterparts. This was the case because those who expressed gratitude were perceived as more agreeable—that is, more tolerant and forgiving—which led their negotiation partners to take advantage of them by acting more aggressively.

Importantly, avoiding the phrase “thank you” did not influence the rate of impasse. This finding suggests that the harmful effect of expressing gratitude on performance is driven by a higher willingness to take advantage of a grateful counterpart rather than a decreased willingness to interact with a counterpart who omits a thank you. In addition, these findings were not just about the words thank you or even about negotiation behavior. Negotiators were also more willing to take advantage of grateful counterparts after reading an online profile in which the counterpart described himself as a “grateful person” who is “thankful for all the people in my life.”

In our study, hearing the words thank you caused negotiators to make inferences and predictions about their counterpart that in turn influenced their decisions. Although grateful people are typically associated with traits that are considered to be desirable (such as friendliness) and elicit positive responses in social interactions (such as liking), expressing gratitude can be detrimental in certain types of negotiation. Why? Because negotiation is an interpersonal interaction that people often view as competitive.

Thus, whereas expressing gratitude may be a winning strategy in most social settings, saying thank you can lead to poorer performance and satisfaction in single-issue negotiations. Our findings are consistent with research by University of Amsterdam professor Gerben Van Kleef and his colleagues that suggests the inferences people make about others’ emotional expressions depend on whether the situation encourages cooperation or competition.

Notably, in our studies, reframing the negotiation in cooperative terms mitigated the effects: Receiving a gratitude expression did not increase selfish behavior in cooperative contexts.

So here’s my advice: Think about the nature of your negotiation. Have you negotiated with this person before? Will you negotiate with her again? If you are negotiating with a salesperson over the price of a new car, then saying thank you in response to a concession is likely to put you in a position of weakness  that the salesperson may use to claim more value—and you are likely to get a worse price.

In contrast, if you are negotiating with a business partner—someone you need to interact with in the future and care about—in a negotiation with value-creation potential, then saying thank you may be a powerful way to signal your preferences, engender trust, and improve the relationship.

Alison Wood Brooks
Assistant Professor
Harvard Business School

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In negotiation, a good agent can be hard to find. Three New York art dealers and a Russian billionaire learned that lesson the hard way in negotiations over the sale of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, as reported by Bloomberg and the New York Times.

A case of mistaken identity

The strange saga began in 2005, when the three dealers paid about $10,000 in an estate auction for a badly damaged painting of Jesus Christ believed to be a 16th-century work from Leonardo’s school.

One of the dealers, Old Masters specialist Robert Simon, brought the painting to art restorer Dianne Modestini in New York. Over the course of several years, Modestini painstakingly removed the varnish and overpainting of previous restoration attempts to reveal what she came to believe was Leonardo’s lost Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World—a great lost work of art. Curators at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art authenticated the discovery. The Mundi, whose first owner was believed to have been King Charles of England, had fallen in and out of sight over the centuries before being mistakenly sold as the work of another artist for just 45 pounds at Sotheby’s London in 1958.

One painting, two stories

After the painting was restored, Simon and his colleagues lent it to museums while spreading the word that it was for sale. The director of the Dallas Museum of Art badly wanted to buy the painting. But with the sellers asking for $150 million, the two sides remained too far apart on price, and the Mundi returned to
New York, according to Bloomberg.

Then, in quick succession, two potential buyers emerged: (1) a Russian billionaire and (2) a client of Sotheby’s, Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier, who was anonymous to the sellers. The sellers set up two separate appointments.

Working on behalf of the sellers, Sotheby’s insured the Mundi for $150 million. Bouvier arranged for a Sotheby’s representative, Samuel Valette, to show the painting to him and another man at one of New York’s most expensive apartments. Sotheby’s says that it didn’t know the identity of the man who was with Bouvier; nor did the painting’s sellers.

As it turns out, that other man was the billionaire who had already scheduled a separate viewing of the Leonardo, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the lavish apartment was his home. Rybolovlev, who has amassed one of the world’s most valuable art collections, had frequently hired Bouvier as an art adviser. And Bouvier had offered to help Rybolovlev buy the Leonardo through Sotheby’s, including by advising him on price.

In fact, Bouvier reportedly planned to first buy the Leonardo himself through Sotheby’s, while hiding his identity from the sellers as an anonymous buyer. At the same time, Bouvier represented himself to Rybolovlev as his agent, allegedly tricking him into thinking that he, Rybolovlev, was buying the painting through Sotheby’s.

The art of the deal

Having seen the painting with Bouvier, Rybolovlev canceled his own scheduled viewing. The sellers thought he had dropped out of the bidding, not knowing that he thought he was buying the painting through Bouvier. That left the sellers with just Sotheby’s anonymous buyer—Bouvier.

In price negotiations in Paris that April, a mysterious agent for the anonymous buyer (Bouvier) reportedly “hammered the sellers,” driving
them down from their latest asking price of $100 million, according to Bloomberg. The parties settled on $80 million, the bulk of which Bouvier paid in cash, plus a $3 million commission for Sotheby’s.

Unbeknown to the three art dealers who had just sold the Mundi, Bouvier was already scheming to resell the painting to Rybolovlev—who thought he was buying it through Sotheby’s with Bouvier acting as his agent. According to an email filed in court by Rybolovlev’s lawyers, Bouvier lied to a Rybolovlev representative that he had offered the sellers $100 million for the Leonardo on behalf of Rybolovlev but that they had turned him down “without a moment’s hesitation.” Bouvier ended up convincing Rybolovlev to pay $127.5 million—$47.5 million more than Bouvier had paid for it himself just days earlier. Rybolovlev thought he bought the painting from the trio of sellers, through Sotheby’s, when in fact he bought it from Bouvier.

Scratching beneath the surface

After Bouvier was caught allegedly flipping the Mundi, the trio of sellers were not only angry with him but also suspicious of Sotheby’s. Bouvier was a valued client of the auction house. Had Sotheby’s known of Bouvier’s plans to resell the painting for a much higher price?

Rybolovlev had similar questions. The Mundi was just one of 38 paintings his family’s trust had purchased through Bouvier, 12 of them through Sotheby’s. The billionaire has said he thought Bouvier was acting as his agent, earning a 2% commission, only to learn that he had previously skimmed up to $1 billion by buying the paintings himself and reselling them to Rybolovlev with hefty markups. Rybolovlev filed criminal charges against Bouvier in Monaco, where Bouvier was arrested in 2015 and freed on bond, the Times reports.

Denying all the accusations against him, Bouvier has said he is free to charge whatever the market will bear for a painting. Furthermore, he said that Sotheby’s didn’t know about his relationship with Rybolovlev and that the billionaire was far too sophisticated a collector to be conned into significantly overpaying for artwork, according to Bloomberg.

A private matter blows up

As for the painting’s trio of sellers, they have accused Sotheby’s of colluding with Bouvier. In court papers filed in November 2016 to try to block a lawsuit, Sotheby’s claimed it hadn’t known of its anonymous buyer’s plans to flip the Leonardo for a much higher price.

In a statement, the three art dealers who sold the Mundi accused Sotheby’s of trying to “spin their egregious behavior in the face of media scrutiny.” The dealers noted that 20 months after the sale, Sotheby’s had provided Bouvier with an insurance appraisal that valued the Leonardo at $113 million, closer to the price Rybolovlev paid than to the price Bouvier negotiated. Another instance, in which Bouvier flipped a Gustav Klimt painting to Rybolovlev after buying it through Sotheby’s, also aroused their suspicions.

Insisting they had attempted to negotiate the matter in private, the dealers now say they will try to “correct” Sotheby’s “distortions” through court actions, including suing Sotheby’s for fraud to recover the millions more they might have earned from the sale.

2 tips to avoid being taken for a ride:

Identify conflicts of interest. Clients often assume their agents’ financial incentives are perfectly aligned with their own, but that is rarely the case. Sotheby’s, for example, may have had an incentive to get a high price for the Leonardo’s sellers to increase its commission, but it also was motivated to keep Bouvier, a repeat client, satisfied. Before hiring an agent, scrutinize her likely incentives and determine whether they are closely aligned with your own.

Insist on transparency. The shadowy nature of sales in the art world allowed Bouvier to misrepresent himself and his intentions to art buyers and sellers alike. You can avoid being taken advantage of in negotiation by insisting that all parties, including agents, be willing to engage in a clear and transparent process.

We know that anger leads negotiators to make riskier choices and blame others when things go wrong. In a new study, researchers Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer find that anger also leads us to engage in greater deception in negotiation—even when it’s not our counterpart who angered us.

In one of the study’s experiments, participants were asked to write an essay about an inspirational moment from their lives. Some participants then received handwritten feedback from another participant that insulted the essay—for example, by calling it “stupid” or “ordinary.” Other participants simply received a factual summary of their essay as feedback. Not surprisingly, those in the former condition felt much angrier than those in the latter condition after reading their feedback.

Next, the participants were randomly paired with another participant, one who had not evaluated their essay, for an online game. In the game, the participants were tasked with anonymously allocating money between themselves and their partner. Those who had been primed to feel angry were more likely to deceptively exaggerate the generosity of their offer to their counterpart than were those who were primed to feel neutral. The researchers also found that anger—but not another negative emotion, sadness—prompted less-ethical behavior but only when participants had financial incentives to behave deceptively. Anger reduced participants’ empathy, making them more self-interested and thus more open to behaving deceptively.

Interestingly, the anger that participants felt in these studies was unrelated to their counterparts or other aspects of the decisions they faced. Anger triggered by one’s counterpart could generate even less ethical behavior, Yip and Schweitzer speculate. The results suggest the value of taking a break to cool down when you feel angry during a negotiation and encouraging counterparts to do the same, lest someone engage in behavior they later regret.

Resource: “Mad and Misleading: Incidental Anger Promotes Deception,” by Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016.

We know that anger leads negotiators to make riskier choices and blame others when things go wrong. In a new study, researchers Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer find that anger also leads us to engage in greater deception in negotiation—even when it’s not our counterpart who angered us.

In one of the study’s experiments, participants were asked to write an essay about an inspirational moment from their lives. Some participants then received handwritten feedback from another participant that insulted the essay—for example, by calling it “stupid” or “ordinary.” Other participants simply received a factual summary of their essay as feedback. Not surprisingly, those in the former condition felt much angrier than those in the latter condition after reading their feedback.

Next, the participants were randomly paired with another participant, one who had not evaluated their essay, for an online game. In the game, the participants were tasked with anonymously allocating money between themselves and their partner. Those who had been primed to feel angry were more likely to deceptively exaggerate the generosity of their offer to their counterpart than were those who were primed to feel neutral. The researchers also found that anger—but not another negative emotion, sadness—prompted less-ethical behavior but only when participants had financial incentives to behave deceptively. Anger reduced participants’ empathy, making them more self-interested and thus more open to behaving deceptively.

Interestingly, the anger that participants felt in these studies was unrelated to their counterparts or other aspects of the decisions they faced. Anger triggered by one’s counterpart could generate even less ethical behavior, Yip and Schweitzer speculate. The results suggest the value of taking a break to cool down when you feel angry during a negotiation and encouraging counterparts to do the same, lest someone engage in behavior they later regret.

Resource: “Mad and Misleading: Incidental Anger Promotes Deception,” by Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016.

Negotiators are often taught that the more alternatives they have, the more fortunate they are. If it’s good to have one strong best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, then it’s better to have many alternatives, right?

Not necessarily, results from a new study by Michael Schaerer of INSEAD and his colleagues show. In a series of experiments, the researchers gave participants either one alternative to their current negotiation or several. Across the studies, those who had more than one alternative perceived the bargaining zone to be less advantageous to them and made less-ambitious first offers than those who had only one alternative.

In one of the experiments, for example, where participants had to sell a coffee maker to another participant, the less-ambitious first offers of those with multiple alternatives resulted in worse outcomes as compared to those with just one alternative. These results were found regardless of whether the average price of the multiple alternatives was higher (e.g., $85, $80, and $75) or lower (e.g., $75, $70, and $65) than the price in the single-alternative condition ($75).

The researchers found evidence that a range of offers serves as a more powerful anchor than a single offer in affecting our perceptions of the bargaining zone. For example, suppose that a seller is trying to negotiate the price of a coffee maker and has already secured an alternative offer of $75. This seller is likely to construe the offer of $75 as more attractive (and less likely to bargain harder) if she also has two other offers of $70 and $65 than if she has only the one offer of $75. In effect, alternatives worse than one’s BATNA, which should be irrelevant to our decision making, anchor our expectations and first offers downward.

There are limits to this effect: The researchers found that multiple alternatives reduce first offers only when negotiators thought about their first offers in purely numeric ways (e.g., “Should I ask for $90 or $85?”), rather than more descriptively (e.g., “Should I make a moderate or high first offer?”), and lead to worse outcomes only when participants made the first offer themselves rather than responding to a counterpart’s first offer.

Don’t take these results as permission to stop looking for strong alternatives after identifying one solid BATNA, as this could lead you to end the search too early. Rather, after identifying multiple alternatives, do your best to focus on the one you value most and try to put the others out of your mind.

Resource: “Bargaining Zone Distortion in Negotiations: The Elusive Power of Multiple Alternatives,” by Michael Schaerer, David D. Loschelder, and Roderick I. Swaab. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016.

In negotiation, it’s nice to get the deal right the first time. But if carefully laid plans fall apart, you may still be able to recover. That’s what the government of Colombia and the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, did after their peace agreement was narrowly defeated in a national referendum.

A quest for peace

The FARC had waged its guerrilla war against the government of Colombia since 1964, fighting for Marxist rule and agrarian reforms using conventional military operations and terrorist tactics. Although the conflict gradually diminished over the course of five decades, the FARC’s fighters kept their movement alive through a profitable cocaine trade, kidnappings, and other criminal acts. Peace negotiations repeatedly collapsed. An estimated 220,000 people died in the conflict, and more than five million were displaced by it, the New York Times reports.

If Colombians longed for the conflict to end, many also wanted to ensure the guerrillas would be brought to justice for their crimes. Those twin goals proved difficult to balance as Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos launched peace negotiations with the FARC in 2012.

Following many rounds of negotiations mediated by the Cuban government in Havana, the two sides signed a cease-fire accord in June 2016 and a peace deal on September 26. In the agreement, the Colombian government promised to invest in rural development and aid the FARC in transforming itself into a legal political party with guaranteed representation in Congress. Santos’s government also vowed to grant amnesty to FARC members or give them reduced sentences for crimes. In return, the FARC said it would end its illegal drug trade, remove land mines, turn over its weapons to United Nations inspectors, and engage in community work and other acts of reparation.

As stipulated by Santos, all that was needed was for Colombians to vote to ratify the deal in a referendum. The negotiators seemed to have little to worry about, as polls suggested that support for the agreement was high.

An October surprise

But the polls were wrong. On October 2, just six days after Santos shook hands with FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño, Colombians voted narrowly against the peace agreement, 50.2% to 49.8%. A low turnout, caused by Hurricane Matthew, and former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s vocal opposition to the deal contributed to the failure. As it turned out, many voters agreed with Uribe that the deal was too soft on the guerrillas, according to the Times.

Though shaken by the loss, the two sides quickly got back to the bargaining table, determined to make adjustments to win over critics of the deal. On October 7, they were emboldened by the news that Santos had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in support of his efforts to end the conflict. And after Donald J. Trump was elected president in the United States on November 8, Santos was particularly keen to have an agreement ratified while President Barack Obama, a supporter of the deal, was still in office.

Take 2

Negotiating around the clock, the government shuttled between conservative political leaders who had opposed the deal and FARC negotiators. In the end, the parties reached a deal that incorporates about 50 new changes designed to broaden its appeal. The revised agreement gives judges greater latitude in prosecuting drug trafficking by rebels and clearer protections for landowners in the countryside. However, it does not allow for tough prison sentences for rebels— an issue that the government believed  to be a nonstarter for the rebels—nor  does it completely bar those involved in war crimes from participating in politics, the Times reports.

With Uribe still opposing the deal, Santos didn’t risk leaving the outcome in the hands of the people again. Rather, the accord was sent to Colombia’s Congress, where Santos had strong support. On November 30, the Congress voted to ratify the deal, even as its remaining opponents walked out of the chamber
in protest.