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Article Harvard Business Review How to Make the Other Side Play Fair: The Final-Offer Arbitration Challenge Gives Negotiators a Valuable New Tool |
In legal disputes, contested insurance claims, and similarly adversarial negotiations, one party is likely to open with an inflated claim or a lowball offer. And if the other side’s position is unreasonable, it may make little sense to be reasonable yourself. But if everyone routinely came to a dispute with a realistic starting position, the offers would be more or less aligned, and any negotiation that followed would most likely be relatively civil, speedy, and fair. How can a negotiator who wants to be fair from the start ensure that his or her counterpart will be reasonable as well? The authors propose the final-offer arbitration challenge, which leverages an approach first applied in labor negotiations in the 1960s. You can employ this tactic by opening with a demonstrably fair offer and then—if the other party is unreasonable—extending a challenge to take the competing offers to an arbitrator who must choose one or the other rather than a compromise between them (the usual outcome of conventional arbitration). The authors describe how AIG used the approach and how other companies can begin to adopt it.
Keywords: Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Offer;
Bazerman, Max H., and Daniel Kahneman. "How to Make the Other Side Play Fair: The Final-Offer Arbitration Challenge Gives Negotiators a Valuable New Tool." Harvard Business Review 94, no. 9 (September 2016): 76–81.
