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The Poverty of Buyer and Seller
Kevin Avruch*
Editors’ Note: In a world in which negotiating can implicate your most important values, Avruch points out that the most common mental model of negotiators is that of buyer and seller. Yet both our most intimate and our greatest negotiations have little to do with the whole basis of buyer-and-seller ideas. Avruch offers a way at least to begin to rethink, to find our way out of this trap.
This chapter is republished from the same editors’ Negotiator’s Fieldbook (American Bar Assoc. 2006). We appreciate the ABA’s courtesy in agreeing to this republication. Although this chapter was not updated for the NDR, we believe it continues to be a unique and valuable resource. Some formatting has been updated; the text of the chapter and the author’s bio are unaltered.
My goal in this essay is to examine the question of whether negotiation theory and practice is of much use in social conflicts involving deeply rooted disputes over values. I proceed first by examining critically the foundational heuristic of what I call canonical or first-generation negotiation theory: the buyer-seller heuristic.[1] I then propose, and critically examine, another heuristic.
The First Generation Heuristic: Rational Choice and the Buyer-Seller
Almost every formal academic treatment of negotiation, and quite a few informal ones as well, reveals its basis in the larger theory of rational choice (or rational decision-making) and the key heuristic of the buyer-seller encounter.[2] Buyers meet sellers in different sorts of markets all the time and everywhere, and although the nature of these markets is hardly the same, the essential roles are remarkably constant and recognizable.[3] The two—the theory and the heuristic—are of course inextricably entangled in neo-classical economics: rational choice as its conceptual foundation and the buyer-seller transaction as its paradigmatic praxis. No one can deny the rigor, parsimony, and productiveness of the rational choice paradigm even if, as one commentator notes, the model is not without flaws, “not least through the real world’s bloody-minded obstinacy in simply not conforming to theory.”[4] The obvious and frequent disconnect between actors’ behavior as “predicted” by the paradigm and their actual behavior has long been noted by scholars, both those working within the paradigm and those critics outside it. Perhaps the explanation for the disconnect that is most friendly to the theory involves information. Rational choice requires actors to possess rigorously valid and reliable information about many variables to arrive at a decision. In the “real world” such information is very often partial or imperfect and hence, expectedly, decisions are far from optimally rational.[5]
A more serious critique raises the possibility that the human cognizing apparatus charged with effecting rational choice decision-making calculi is itself intrinsically to blame: it is not up to the task. This can result from structural limitations in the capacity of the cognitive apparatus to store, retrieve, or process information, or from a range of other distortion-causing mechanisms, many supported by the apparent organismic requirement for “cognitive miserliness” (or risk aversion), resulting in such framing biases as attribution errors, just-world thinking, mirror imaging, illusory correlations, reactive devaluation, etc.[6] More recently, that most important distinction in the theory of mind assumed by rational choice theory—a bifurcation, actually—between “cognition” on the one hand and “emotion” on the other has been questioned. Affect and cognition appear to interpenetrate one another all the time in our thinking.[7] And if our conception of thinking—of cognition—no longer allows the partitioning away of (messy, irrational) emotion, then how can we assume that rational choice theory “predicts” any actor’s behavior any time?
These are some of the critiques that have emerged from within cognitive psychology itself, at the foundation of rational choice theorizing. I will not engage here two other important sources of critique. The first has to do with the problem of how one gets from the behavior of an individual rational actor to the behavior of the collective—a problem that has engaged some of the best minds in a variety of the social sciences.[8] The second is basically a cultural critique, questioning the assumption of the universality of utilities divorced from their encompassing contexts of meaning and valuation.[9] The adequacy of such a concept of utility for understanding other cultures has long been questioned,[10] but the questions become harder if one imagines trying to “transact” (say, negotiate) across different “utility universes.” For even if we assume that a behavioral theory of utility maximizing holds across all cultures, if we admit that the nature of utilities varies cross-culturally, then, to imagine intercultural “rational” transactions we would also have to assume that culturally-specific utilities are everywhere essentially fungible.[11] But for the purposes of this essay I want to hold cultural variability constant, and redirect our analysis of utility to the related notion, so important in contemporary negotiation theory and practice, that of “interest.”
In what one might legitimately call the first “Copernican revolution” of negotiation theory and practice, the idea was put forward that if individuals could be shown that most unproductive and inefficient negotiation involves arguments around surface demands or “positions,” then the act of having parties move beyond positions to analyze their underlying interests would free them to engage in a whole range of creative problem-solving activities. Put more formally, one could in many (though certainly not all) situations move from distributive (fixed-pie, zero-sum) bargaining toward problem solving and integrative (expanded-pie, positive-sum) solutions, toward the famous “win-win” agreement.[12] The question which some within our field have asked is whether anything (capable of motivating behavior or social action) lay “beneath” interests. This is the crucial question if one wants to assess the relevance of negotiation for conflicts around issues involving ideology, identity, or values….
For full contents please purchase The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.
Endnotes
*(from The Negotiator’s Fieldbook, ABA 2006) Kevin Avruch is Professor of Conflict Resolution and Anthropology, Associate Director at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and senior fellow and faculty in the Peace Operations Policy Program, School of Public Policy, at George Mason University. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture and conflict analysis and resolution, negotiation, political violence, and ethnonationalism, and the author or editor of five books, most recently Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) and Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000). He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. In 1996-1997 he was a senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace at the United States Institute of Peace.
A version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Conflict Management on June 6-9, 2004 in Pittsburgh, PA. I thank co-panelist Linda Putnam and organizers Christopher Honeyman and Andrea Schneider. In subsequent drafts, Evans Mandes helped with additional sources in cognitive psychology. My colleagues Marc Gopin, Christopher Honeyman, Dan Rothbart, Richard Rubenstein, Andrea Schneider, and Wallace Warfield all read earlier drafts closely and critically. Having satisfied none of them entirely, I thank them wholeheartedly.
[1] I borrow the notion of a negotiation ‘canon’ from Christopher Honeyman and Andrea Schneider. See the special issue they edited of the Marquette Law Review: The Emerging Interdisciplinary Canon of Negotiation, 87 Marquette Law Review (2004).
[2] See, e.g., Howard Raiffa, The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982); Richard E. Walton & Robert B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (1965); Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981).
[3] ‘Recognizable’ but not necessarily ‘identical.’ Other markets in other places (‘cultures’) provide evidence of this. See Clifford Geertz, Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou, in Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society 222 (Clifford Geertz, et al., eds., 1979). Among other things--pace Leigh Thompson on ‘trust’—Geertz writes of buyer-seller interaction in the suq: ‘Bargaining does not operate in purely pragmatic, utilitarian terms, but is hedged in by deeply felt rules of etiquette, tradition, and moral expectation.’ Id.
[4] Jocelyn Evans, Fitting Extremism into the Rational Choice Paradigm, 39 Government and Opposition 110 (2004).
[5] Herbet A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (1982).
[6] For a discussion of such regular distortions found in international negotiation at the state level, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976). An early insight in this direction, deeply connected to peace studies and coming from a polymath and perennially former-economist is Kenneth Boulding, The Image: Knowledge of Life and Society (1956).
[7] A sample of recent works in this vein—Joseph Forgas, Feeling and thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (2001); Eric Eich, Cognition and Emotion (2000); Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thought (Nico H. Fridja, et al., eds., 2000).
[8] On the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ start with this classic work: Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, Dec. 13, 1968, at 1243-48. An economist proposes an ‘impossibility theorem’ in Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1963). For skepticism directed at a sociological ‘invisible hand’ capable of maximally organizing social collectivities, see Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity (1987). I have hardly scratched the surface of this literature in rational choice and exchange theory, ranging from ecology and economics to sociology and political science.
[9] Kevin Avruch, Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998).
[10] Start with Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
[11] See Aaron Wildavsky, Choosing Preference by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation, 81 American Political Science Review 3 (1987) (arguing against the universality and for the cultural variability of ‘preferences’ [utilities]).
[12] Outside of the more formal negotiation literature the locus classicus of this argument is Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes, supra note 2 (but see the book’s second edition, 1991). Although I have critiqued this book from a cultural perspective in the past, it is mildly distressing to see ‘win-win’ turned so decisively into a cliché. I have been in the field long enough to remember first encountering the phrase ‘win-win’ as a genuine and thought-provoking insight. Now one can hear it used routinely by Pentagon spokespersons, or on unwary consumers in the finance departments of Ford dealerships all over the country.
This chapter is republished from the same editors’ Negotiator’s Fieldbook (American Bar Assoc. 2006). We appreciate the ABA’s courtesy in agreeing to this republication. Although this chapter was not updated for the NDR, we believe it continues to be a unique and valuable resource. Some formatting has been updated; the text of the chapter and the author’s bio are unaltered.
My goal in this essay is to examine the question of whether negotiation theory and practice is of much use in social conflicts involving deeply rooted disputes over values. I proceed first by examining critically the foundational heuristic of what I call canonical or first-generation negotiation theory: the buyer-seller heuristic.[1] I then propose, and critically examine, another heuristic.
The First Generation Heuristic: Rational Choice and the Buyer-Seller
Almost every formal academic treatment of negotiation, and quite a few informal ones as well, reveals its basis in the larger theory of rational choice (or rational decision-making) and the key heuristic of the buyer-seller encounter.[2] Buyers meet sellers in different sorts of markets all the time and everywhere, and although the nature of these markets is hardly the same, the essential roles are remarkably constant and recognizable.[3] The two—the theory and the heuristic—are of course inextricably entangled in neo-classical economics: rational choice as its conceptual foundation and the buyer-seller transaction as its paradigmatic praxis. No one can deny the rigor, parsimony, and productiveness of the rational choice paradigm even if, as one commentator notes, the model is not without flaws, “not least through the real world’s bloody-minded obstinacy in simply not conforming to theory.”[4] The obvious and frequent disconnect between actors’ behavior as “predicted” by the paradigm and their actual behavior has long been noted by scholars, both those working within the paradigm and those critics outside it. Perhaps the explanation for the disconnect that is most friendly to the theory involves information. Rational choice requires actors to possess rigorously valid and reliable information about many variables to arrive at a decision. In the “real world” such information is very often partial or imperfect and hence, expectedly, decisions are far from optimally rational.[5]
A more serious critique raises the possibility that the human cognizing apparatus charged with effecting rational choice decision-making calculi is itself intrinsically to blame: it is not up to the task. This can result from structural limitations in the capacity of the cognitive apparatus to store, retrieve, or process information, or from a range of other distortion-causing mechanisms, many supported by the apparent organismic requirement for “cognitive miserliness” (or risk aversion), resulting in such framing biases as attribution errors, just-world thinking, mirror imaging, illusory correlations, reactive devaluation, etc.[6] More recently, that most important distinction in the theory of mind assumed by rational choice theory—a bifurcation, actually—between “cognition” on the one hand and “emotion” on the other has been questioned. Affect and cognition appear to interpenetrate one another all the time in our thinking.[7] And if our conception of thinking—of cognition—no longer allows the partitioning away of (messy, irrational) emotion, then how can we assume that rational choice theory “predicts” any actor’s behavior any time?
These are some of the critiques that have emerged from within cognitive psychology itself, at the foundation of rational choice theorizing. I will not engage here two other important sources of critique. The first has to do with the problem of how one gets from the behavior of an individual rational actor to the behavior of the collective—a problem that has engaged some of the best minds in a variety of the social sciences.[8] The second is basically a cultural critique, questioning the assumption of the universality of utilities divorced from their encompassing contexts of meaning and valuation.[9] The adequacy of such a concept of utility for understanding other cultures has long been questioned,[10] but the questions become harder if one imagines trying to “transact” (say, negotiate) across different “utility universes.” For even if we assume that a behavioral theory of utility maximizing holds across all cultures, if we admit that the nature of utilities varies cross-culturally, then, to imagine intercultural “rational” transactions we would also have to assume that culturally-specific utilities are everywhere essentially fungible.[11] But for the purposes of this essay I want to hold cultural variability constant, and redirect our analysis of utility to the related notion, so important in contemporary negotiation theory and practice, that of “interest.”
In what one might legitimately call the first “Copernican revolution” of negotiation theory and practice, the idea was put forward that if individuals could be shown that most unproductive and inefficient negotiation involves arguments around surface demands or “positions,” then the act of having parties move beyond positions to analyze their underlying interests would free them to engage in a whole range of creative problem-solving activities. Put more formally, one could in many (though certainly not all) situations move from distributive (fixed-pie, zero-sum) bargaining toward problem solving and integrative (expanded-pie, positive-sum) solutions, toward the famous “win-win” agreement.[12] The question which some within our field have asked is whether anything (capable of motivating behavior or social action) lay “beneath” interests. This is the crucial question if one wants to assess the relevance of negotiation for conflicts around issues involving ideology, identity, or values….
For full contents please purchase The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.
Endnotes
*(from The Negotiator’s Fieldbook, ABA 2006) Kevin Avruch is Professor of Conflict Resolution and Anthropology, Associate Director at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and senior fellow and faculty in the Peace Operations Policy Program, School of Public Policy, at George Mason University. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture and conflict analysis and resolution, negotiation, political violence, and ethnonationalism, and the author or editor of five books, most recently Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) and Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000). He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. In 1996-1997 he was a senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace at the United States Institute of Peace.
A version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Conflict Management on June 6-9, 2004 in Pittsburgh, PA. I thank co-panelist Linda Putnam and organizers Christopher Honeyman and Andrea Schneider. In subsequent drafts, Evans Mandes helped with additional sources in cognitive psychology. My colleagues Marc Gopin, Christopher Honeyman, Dan Rothbart, Richard Rubenstein, Andrea Schneider, and Wallace Warfield all read earlier drafts closely and critically. Having satisfied none of them entirely, I thank them wholeheartedly.
[1] I borrow the notion of a negotiation ‘canon’ from Christopher Honeyman and Andrea Schneider. See the special issue they edited of the Marquette Law Review: The Emerging Interdisciplinary Canon of Negotiation, 87 Marquette Law Review (2004).
[2] See, e.g., Howard Raiffa, The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982); Richard E. Walton & Robert B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (1965); Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981).
[3] ‘Recognizable’ but not necessarily ‘identical.’ Other markets in other places (‘cultures’) provide evidence of this. See Clifford Geertz, Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou, in Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society 222 (Clifford Geertz, et al., eds., 1979). Among other things--pace Leigh Thompson on ‘trust’—Geertz writes of buyer-seller interaction in the suq: ‘Bargaining does not operate in purely pragmatic, utilitarian terms, but is hedged in by deeply felt rules of etiquette, tradition, and moral expectation.’ Id.
[4] Jocelyn Evans, Fitting Extremism into the Rational Choice Paradigm, 39 Government and Opposition 110 (2004).
[5] Herbet A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (1982).
[6] For a discussion of such regular distortions found in international negotiation at the state level, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976). An early insight in this direction, deeply connected to peace studies and coming from a polymath and perennially former-economist is Kenneth Boulding, The Image: Knowledge of Life and Society (1956).
[7] A sample of recent works in this vein—Joseph Forgas, Feeling and thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (2001); Eric Eich, Cognition and Emotion (2000); Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thought (Nico H. Fridja, et al., eds., 2000).
[8] On the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ start with this classic work: Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, Dec. 13, 1968, at 1243-48. An economist proposes an ‘impossibility theorem’ in Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1963). For skepticism directed at a sociological ‘invisible hand’ capable of maximally organizing social collectivities, see Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity (1987). I have hardly scratched the surface of this literature in rational choice and exchange theory, ranging from ecology and economics to sociology and political science.
[9] Kevin Avruch, Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998).
[10] Start with Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
[11] See Aaron Wildavsky, Choosing Preference by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation, 81 American Political Science Review 3 (1987) (arguing against the universality and for the cultural variability of ‘preferences’ [utilities]).
[12] Outside of the more formal negotiation literature the locus classicus of this argument is Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes, supra note 2 (but see the book’s second edition, 1991). Although I have critiqued this book from a cultural perspective in the past, it is mildly distressing to see ‘win-win’ turned so decisively into a cliché. I have been in the field long enough to remember first encountering the phrase ‘win-win’ as a genuine and thought-provoking insight. Now one can hear it used routinely by Pentagon spokespersons, or on unwary consumers in the finance departments of Ford dealerships all over the country.