I'd also like to throw in music in there. A friend of mine did some research [sorry don't remember the article link] on negotiation and music influence before the negotiation. If I remember correctly, classical music made the negotiator soft. So, next time you want to be a tough negotiator, don't listen to classical music before and give a comfy chair to your opponent at a soft musicky place :-)
Of course you should keep in mind, that the objective of (most) negotiations should be to find a solution that's equitable to all parties. And the other guy should still be happy with his position after he slept a night on it.
The object of the negotiation itself is to seek equilibrium. That goal is best achieved, though, by each party to the negotiation acting out of pure self-interest, not ceding any unnecessary ground to the other. (The Nash equilibrium of the Iterated Prisoner's dilemma has both sides defect on every turn, in other words.) To "win" the negotiation, both sides should be primed "hard."
> That goal is best achieved, though, by each party to the negotiation acting out of pure self-interest, not ceding any unnecessary ground to the other.
That's true for certain cases. In an iterated game, possibly with more than two players, enlightened self-interest could make people seek a reputation for fairness and generosity.
Also -- have you looked at the ultimatum game? It works like this: Alice proposes how to split a dollar between herself and Bob. Bob can accept the division, and both get paid out by the game, or Bob can reject, and nobody gets anything.
Real Bobs tend to reject `unfair' proposals, even when the game is not iterated. That's not rational (at least within the game). So if Alice where driving as hard as she could go with a rational Bob, she won't get anything when playing with Humans.
> Real Bobs tend to reject `unfair' proposals, even when the game is not iterated. That's not rational (at least within the game).
It is rational when you add to the game the human consideration of post-game retaliation. The threat of revenge for injustice (whether by the loser, or an arbiter) creates the potential for "fairness and generosity." Real Bobs are made to stop playing.
