Negotiations And Bargaining Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Negotiations are successive moves among two or more parties in order to resolve conflicts, address common problems, or change the behavior of one of the parties. Bargaining refers to the actual process or the techniques and moves within a negotiation and can involve persuasion, demands, and concessions. The classic paradigm of negotiations and bargaining is a car dealer selling a car to a buyer through persuasion. For the two parties to come to agreement, there must exist a zone of agreement, which is the set of outcomes to which they can agree. If the buyer is willing to spend up to $20,000 and the car dealer is willing to sell for as little at $15,000, then the zone of agreement exists between $15,000 and $20,000. The final price within that range will reflect the bargaining strategies and tactics employed. In politics, negotiations occur among all kinds of political actors, from the grassroots level to international organizations. While negotiations can cost resources and time, they provide a superior alternative to coercion or use of force. When a zone of agreement exists or can be created through negotiations themselves, all parties are better off through agreement.

Negotiation theories derive their rationale from liberal political thought, insofar as liberal thought posits change in human behavior through interactions. Unsurprisingly, diplomacy (the formal process of interactions among nation-states) arises alongside liberal thought in the modern era as a move away from empires, where brute force or material power tended to determine outcomes among political units. A historical sociology of human interactions is necessary to understand the importance of diplomacy, negotiations, and bargaining in the modern era.

Bargaining power still matters, but its understanding in negotiations is nuanced. It is contingent upon reservations prices (such as those of the buyer and seller above), which are themselves contingent upon the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). If a buyer’s best alternative to what a car dealer offers is a free car from a relative, then that buyer may not agree to even the lowest price from the dealership. Similarly, if Iran or North Korea feels that it has little to lose from developing a nuclear program, or that it has more to lose by capitulating to demand from the United States, then the incentive to not strike an agreement with the United States will be high. In the last example, the United States holds more power than either Iran or North Korea but cannot make either of them comply with its demands, because their BATNA is high.

The overall stance of a negotiation party may be characterized as a negotiation strategy, such as overly aggressive or hawkish behavior versus gentle or dovish behavior. Formally, the term used in negotiations theories to describe hawkish behavior is distributive or value-claiming strategy, where one party seeks to gain over the expense of the other. Dovish behavior in contrast, is an integrative or value-creating strategy; both parties gain. A mixed-motive strategy features elements of both integrative and distributive strategies. Strategies are also defined as the sum total of bargaining tactics, which include the following: attempts to influence agendas, framing demands in persuasive terms, making trade-offs and linkages among negotiation issues, coalition building with like parties or allies, and promoting various packages of agreeable outcomes.

Game theory offers a formal way of understanding strategic negotiations, especially the effects of particular strategies. “Players” are posited as involved in games of strategy involving, in general, collaboration or coordination for a solution (agreement or no agreement). The most common solution is called a Nash equilibrium (named after Princeton mathematician John Nash), wherein each player’s move takes into account the moves of other players. A Nash equilibrium therefore captures important elements of strategic interaction inherent in any negotiation. While highly instructive in revealing the logic of negotiations, game theory is nevertheless critiqued for being abstract and rigid and for requiring each player to have well-defined preferences and strategies. Game theory may be too abstract to capture the interactive complexity of learning, preference formation, and behavioral change within negotiations.

International negotiations in the early twenty-first century feature a multiplicity of actors and issues. While nation-states are still featured prominently, a negotiating table often also features international organizations, civil society groups, business firms, and/or experts. Furthermore, there are usually two levels to an international negotiation: the international level, where negotiators from different countries meet, and a domestic level, where these international actors must negotiate with the people they represent in order to understand, narrow, broaden, or ratify their negotiation mandates. A U.S. trade or security negotiator, for example, must negotiate simultaneously with her foreign counterparts as well as with Congress and/or domestic interest groups. International negotiations are thus complex; further complexity comes from the varieties of negotiations—they can be bilateral, plurilateral, regional, or international in scope.

Negotiations feature in every arena of global politics, including security, trade, human rights, and the environment. Negotiation scholars closely studied the security negotiations between the United States and the USSR in the cold war era, while trade negotiation scholarship attended to the World Trade Organization and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The list of security and trade negotiations continues to grow, and new issue-areas are gaining ascendance. The Montreal protocol phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons is an important instance of successful global negotiations on an environmental issue, while the International Campaign to Ban Landmines is an example of international civil society groups urging disarmament.

Bibliography:

Hopmann, P.Terrence. The Negotiation Process and the Resolution of International Conflicts. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1996.
Victor A, ed. International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. End ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Odell, John S. Negotiating the World Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Osborne, Martin J., and Ariel Rubinstein. A Course in Game Theory. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994.
Singh, J. P. Negotiation and the Global Information Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Zartman, I.William, and Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Power and Negotiation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

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