Jim Coben, on behalf of himself and Nancy Welsh, is circulating the following request. Dear Colleagues: I write to appeal to the “hive-mind” on behalf of the Dispute Resolution Magazine. In the upcoming fall issue, we are planning to include a “numbers” teaser box. More specifically, it’s an opportunity to feature interesting statistics and/or other … Continue reading Coben and Welsh Want Your Favorite Number
A short piece in the New York Times by Harvard economists and Yale psychologists has a suggestion that may surprise you – or maybe not – about people’s motivation to cooperate. The authors focus on the “tragedy of the commons” which is the situation “where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each’s self-interest behave … Continue reading Why Cooperate?
Pop quiz: Which is scientific data – statement A or B? A. “If I act for the Big Bad Wolf against Little Red Riding Hood and I don’t want this dispute resolved, I want to tie it up as long as I possibly can, and mandatory mediation is custom made. I can waste more time, … Continue reading What Me – A Social Scientist?
BARBRI’s “State of the Legal Field Survey” reports that “71 percent of 3L law students believe they possess sufficient practice skills. In contrast, only 23 percent of practicing attorneys who work at companies that hire recent law school graduates believe recent law school graduates possess sufficient practice skills.” This finding is puzzling and astounding. It … Continue reading Illusions of Competence
Jen wrote a comment about my post that built on Prof. Vincent Cardi’s new article, “Litigation as Violence,” describing some effects of “violence” even from non-physical acts. She wrote: We in ADR should not undervalue, when analyzing the dispute resolution landscape, the regulatory function of litigation in the United States. A business executive may feel … Continue reading Minimizing Unnecessary Violence in Litigation and Other Dispute Resolution Processes
In a series of posts, I described significant problems with the traditional negotiation paradigm of two coherent models, positional and interest-based negotiation (or other labels for essentially the same models). This paradigm has been helpful in moving us forward in recent decades. But simply saying that something was a interest-based or positional negotiation not only … Continue reading How Can You Get a Piece of the Action?
In previous posts, I argued that there are serious problems with the general consensus on negotiation theory reflected most clearly in Getting to Yes. I described problems with the system of negotiation models, which assumes that most or all negotiations can fit into two models of highly-correlated variables (or a few variations of these models). … Continue reading We Need a Better Consensus about Negotiation Theory
In Part 1, I argued that there are fundamental problems with the system of negotiation models. In this part, I describe actual negotiation cases from my study to illustrate the problems. As you read about them, consider that I am now focusing primarily on problems with descriptive theory – basically a kind of language enabling … Continue reading Problems with the System of Negotiation Models, Part 2
SSRN subscribers will soon see a passel of my old articles scrolling across their screens and may wonder, “What the heck?” The heck is that, thanks to a new scanner, I was able to make nice pdf files of some articles I wrote before I started posting pieces on SSRN. With the benefit of hindsight, … Continue reading Oldies But Goodies
Based on my study of lawyers’ actual negotiations, A Framework for Advancing Negotiation Theory: Implications from a Study of How Lawyers Reach Agreement in Pretrial Litigation, I have reluctantly concluded that the generally-accepted understanding of negotiation theory is seriously flawed and that we need a better theory. The current framework relies primarily on two models … Continue reading Problems with the System of Negotiation Models, Part 1
