Publication database

“The kitchen purchase” is a simulation of bargaining over the price of a fitted kitchen. The case study consists of a briefing for the sellers (the Hase family) and a briefing for the buyers (the Stulle family). On the basis of these briefings the course participants negotiate individually or in teams of two. The case study has been kept simple so that the negotiations can be conducted with very little preparation time needed. At the same time the case study presents a few “stumbling blocks” and permits a profound discussion on the distributive and integrative conduct of negotiations, handling bargaining power, and the ethics of bargaining. The case study is therefore especially well-suited for course participants with intermediate to advanced negotiating experience.

The case study aims at developing course participants' negotiation skills. Specifically, participants learn how to systematically prepare negotiations, how to determine and exploit bargaining power, how to tap into integrative potentials in distributive negotiations, and, optionally, how to negotiate in teams.

We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider problem is so severe that the equilibrium number of experiments is at most one plus the number of experiments that a single agent would perform. When payoffs are private information and players can communicate via cheap talk, the socially optimal symmetric experimentation profile can be supported as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium for sufficiently optimistic prior beliefs. These results generalize to more than two players whenever the success probability per period is not too high. In particular, this is the case when successes occur at the jump times of a Poisson process and the period length is sufficiently small.

With permission of Elsevier

We provide new formulae for the potential of the Shapley value that use the multilinear extension of coalitional games with transferable utility.

With permission of Elsevier

Winchester House in San Jose, California, was once the residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Winchester. This mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. It is, unfortunately, also a great analogy for how many organizations have constructed their IT systems.

Rejections are common in everyday life, yet their consequences for individual behavior remain little studied. We examine a situation in which organizations invite people outside their boundaries to provide suggestions for formal action. Organizations that receive such suggestions can choose to act upon them, ignore them, or even reject them. While rejections carry a cost (i.e., potentially alienating the suggestion-maker), they are also an important source for motivation and learning. We unite these opposing views and argue that rejections can under certain conditions increase effort; moreover, we document how people learn by changing their behavior when trying again.

With permission of the Academy of Management