Customer Reviews

Lectures on Negotiation Analysis

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As a reviewer, I owe potential readers the disclosure of a deep-seated personal bias. I have the greatest respect for Howard Raiffa, for his academic contributions, as well as for his worldly achievements such as his pivotal role in the creation and enlightened leadership of the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxemburg, near Vienna, Austria--probably the only institution that insured a sustained, open, and fruitful dialogue between the West and the East during the coldest periods of the Cold War.

While most aware of my bias, I give a five star rating to this modest collection of class notes. Indeed, while the form--commented transparencies--qualifies as humble, while the content could appear as naïve, and while academics constitute his primary audience, Raiffa provides deep, wise, operational insights useful to all people engaged in negotiation--i.e., most of us--throughout the 111 pages that make up these lecture notes.

The key to the originality of this surprisingly homogenous scholarly piece resides with Raiffa deciding to assume the opposite of what most of us would entering a negotiation. Indeed, Raiffa assumes a Full Open and Transparent Exchange (FOTE) of information between the parties taking part in a negotiation. Lifting the veil of secrecy enables Raiffa to pinpoint what often preempts satisfactory negotiation outcomes and to discuss ways and present methodologies that allow the parties engaged in a negotiation to all get better deals. How can we achieve this? By identifying the efficiency frontier and by coming closer to it and, hence, to optimal deals. Most methodologies rely on the ranking and quantification of the respective, relative preferences of the parties in the negotiation. Implicitly, they constitute arguments in favor of the intervention of a neutral facilitator. The parties would swear such a facilitator into secrecy and communicate to the facilitator confidential information. In turn, the facilitator would help parties move towards better deals.

Now, rest assured that Raiffa does not stick to FOTE throughout. Raiffa knows very well that, more often than not, negotiations entail some measure of secrecy. Consequently, Raiffa lowers the veil of secrecy just a bit and analyzes more common if not more realistic configurations, such as POTE or Partially Open and Transparent Exchange.

My main methodological caveat relates to the limits imposed upon us by the mathematics of optimization. When replicating the examples in the text, I realized that my ability to match the numerical results depended on the version of the software that I used. This says something about the sensitivity of the results to the numerical algorithm used to solve the constrained optimization problem. It may also say something about the sensitivity of the results to the specific numerical values provided by the parties in the negotiation. This realization certainly calls for caution as far as concerns the robustness and reliability of the results both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense. Working with ranges of values and/or performing parametric and structural sensitivity studies would nicely complement the methodologies presented here. This might make it possible to overcome the aforementioned practical implementation problem.

I believe that the operative concepts and useful tools that Raiffa presents in his lecture notes go beyond the metaphorical. In truth, I believe that they could benefit parties engaged in many different kinds of negotiations. Moreover, as an MBA and environmental physicist/climatologist with an expectable special interest in negotiation and conflict resolution in the environmental field, I also believe that parties engaged, in particular, in international climate negotiations could benefit from meditating on Raiffa's specific insights about negotiation and from listening to his lifelong plea for sustained, open, and fruitful dialogues.