Negotiation Secrets with Barry Nalebuff | Game Theory
Negotiation is stressful. It can bring out the worst in people. Wouldn’t it be better if there were a principled way to negotiate? Wouldn’t it be even better if there were a way…
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Negotiation is stressful. It can bring out the worst in people. Wouldn’t it be better if there were a principled way to negotiate? Wouldn’t it be even better if there were a way…
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People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. I'm now playing his game and I pick something that's arbitrary. And now it's arbitrary vs. arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
The first thing I'd say is a big mistake is not caring about what the other side wants. Oftentimes people are thinking I have to say no to the other side. My goal is to say yes to them. It's to figure out what it is they want and give it to them.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
I think people all the time, hide or lie about information that would be useful to share. If you think about somebody who's selling their business because they want to climb the seven summits and they think, Oh… that's sort of embarrassing, it's selfish ….and so they say, I'm doing it because I'm retiring. We hide things that are ultimately good reasons.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
What I like the most and essentially is never done is to start off a negotiation by talking about how you'll negotiate, what's the process going to be? And to say things like 'my goal in this negotiation is to reach an agreement with you in which we create a giant pie and split it evenly and can we agree that that's our goal?'
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. Now it's arbitrary versus arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
What I like the most and essentially is never done is to start off a negotiation by talking about how you'll negotiate, what's the process going to be? And to say things like 'my goal in this negotiation is to reach an agreement with you in which we create a giant pie and split it evenly.'
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
I think the people who are larger or those who have more resources like to think they're the ones who have greater power… and they have benefited from that illusion.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor
A lot of negotiation is teaching people tricks or verbal games, as opposed to providing a framework for thinking about negotiation. People want to come up with a solution that's fair. But what they think of as fair is often proportional division, and that just arises because they don't really understand what they're negotiating over.
— Barry NalebuffCo-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor