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Negotiation

Negotiation is the process of joint decision making in social interactions dealing with conflict resolution, or handling collaborative future interaction. It is a communication among individuals and groups trying to forge mutually beneficial agreements. Scholars consider that, in the context of mediation, arbitration, and litigation, negotiation is the most common form of dispute resolution. Negotiation allows the involved parties to resolve their differences without third-party intervention, to manage the decision-making process, and to control the outcome.

Parties engage in negotiation to improve their initial conditions and to resolve problems when no relevant, fixed procedural system exists, or when the parties prefer to work outside the system to reach better solutions to settle what each will give and take, or will perform and receive. Both participants must recognize that their relationship consists of mutual interdependence, and entails management of tangibles such as price or the terms of agreement and intangibles such as self-esteem, reputation, or values. In part an unstructured process, negotiation is thought to be the least formal, most flexible of the disputeresolution methods that include mediation, arbitration, or adjudication.

From the perspective of negotiation, one may analyze a wide range of social relationships and interdependencies—among individuals and within social groups such as families, firms, tribes, ethnicities, religions, classes, or nations—whether occurring when parties assemble formally around a negotiation table, or as an implicit, informal part of day-to-day life. Some social theories regard any interpersonal communication as a kind of negotiation, seeing individuals' interactions as a continuous negotiation over resources such as self-esteem, recognition, and status. Thus, any situation in which the presentation of the self should be managed can be regarded as a negotiation.

Approaches to Negotiation

Negotiation literature describes two primary approaches of negotiation: distributive (adversarial) and cooperative (integrative). The approach that one uses greatly affects the parties' relationship, the manner of conducting negotiations, and the ultimate outcomes. Most early negotiation theories dealt with the distributive style, “a kind of contest in which each party is trying to win” (Schelling 1960: 3), investigating the strategies used to maximize their share of the resources in dispute, to minimize losses, and to achieve domination. These theories presumed an argument over a single matter (such as money) and the parties' inherently contrasting interests on that matter, making one's victory the other's inevitable loss. Each side takes on rational, clever, skilled, and goal-directed behavior; establishes its starting point and the best possible outcome; and determines their bottom line and their ZOPA (zone of possible agreement). This interaction follows a sequential pattern: presentation of one party's demands or proposals, interpretation and evaluation by the other, and counterreactions ranging from rejection to acceptance. The series of concessions between the high and low opening demands and the convergence closer to the midpoint was a form of negotiation dance.

The study of the competitive decision-making process of negotiators, which flourished because of national security concerns during the Cold War era, was significantly influenced by game theories, associating the negotiators' choices to the larger context of conceptualizations concerning individual choices. The game-theory approach to negotiation involved extensive research, which attempted to solve negotiators' problems based on theoretical multiple-choice games such as the famous prisoner's dilemma game, or the negotiator dilemma, and that calculated each decision's risks. Power, a zero-sum resource, existed for one side or the other; tactics based on potential power were linked to possible outcomes.

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