So…my youngest son graduated this spring (yay!) and moved home (yay!) and we needed another car (boo!) This was made even sadder by the fact that there was very little negotiation to be done–if you’ve tried to buy a car since the pandemic, you know the market is still quite wonky with a very limited supply of used cars. This means that there is little room to negotiate–and for the negotiation professor who views car buying as market/real-world research, this is just sad.

But here is what made me happy: my two sons (of three) who live in Milwaukee were arguing about who gets dibs on the new car and this is what they designed:

In case you were wondering, RPS stands for Rock, Paper, Scissors. And, no, they did not engage in either slap fighting or boxing. But I did appreciate their creative thinking and variety of competitive games they selected!

So, in class today about general ADR process design, I asked the students (before putting this picture up on the screen) how they would have decided. Students had excellent ideas for me: which child did I like best; who was a better driver; and who would take better care of the car were all suggested. We then analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of what my sons proposed (all competitive games was a weakness–no parent involved was a strength, etc.) A fun exercise all around so feel free to use!