Negotiation is the process whereby interested parties resolve disputes, agree upon courses of action, bargain for individual or collective advantage, and/or attempt to craft outcomes which serve their mutual interests. It is usually regarded as a form of alternative dispute resolution.
Given this definition, one can see negotiation occurring in almost all walks of life, from parenting to the courtroom.
In the advocacy approach, a skilled negotiator usually serves as advocate for one party to the negotiation and attempts to obtain the most favorable outcomes possible for that party. In this process the negotiator attempts to determine the minimum outcome(s) the other party is (or parties are) willing to accept, then adjusts her demands accordingly. A "successful" negotiation in the advocacy approach is when the negotiator is able to obtain all or most of the outcomes his party desires, but without driving the other party to permanently break off negotiations.
Traditional negotiating is sometimes called win-lose because of the hard-ball style of the negotiators whose motive is to get as much as they can for their side.
In the Seventies, practitioners and researchers began to develop win-win approaches to negotiation. Perhaps the best known was articulated in the book Getting to YES by Harvard's Roger Fisher and Bill Ury. This approach, referred to as Principled Negotiation, is also sometimes called mutual gains bargaining. The mutual gains approach has been effectively applied in environmental situations (see Lawrence Susskind) as well as labor relations where the parties (e.g. management and a labor union) frame the negotiation as problem solving.
Tactics
There are many tactics used by skilled negotiators, including:
presenting demands
deadlines
good guy/bad guy
limited authority
caucusing
walking out
concession patterns
Negotiation as a Wikipedia technique of dispute resolution
Wikipedia:Dispute resolution contemplates users negotiating with one another on article talk pages and on user talk pages and as a part of mediation, see Wikipedia:Negotiation
See also
Arbitration
Best alternative to a negotiated agreement
Collective bargaining
Collective action
Conciliation
Contract
Dispute resolution
Expert determination
Game theory
Impasse
Mediation
Nash equilibrium
Prisoner's dilemma
References and further reading
William Ury, Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving in, Revised 2nd edition, Penguin USA, 1991, trade paperback, ISBN 0140157352; Houghton Mifflin, April, 1992, hardcover, 200 pages, ISBN 0395631246. The first edition, unrevised, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, hardcover, ISBN 0395317576
William Ury, Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation, revised second edition, Bantam, January 1, 1993, trade paperback, ISBN 0553371312; 1st edition under the title, Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People, Bantam, September, 1991, hardcover, 161 pages, ISBN 0553072749
Gerard I. Nierenberg, The Art of Negotiating: Psychological Strategies for Gaining Advantageous Bargains, Barnes and Noble, (1995), hardcover, 195 pages, ISBN 156619816X
