Beta Mannix research on multi-party negotiations...ever relevant

11/5/2011 12:16:00 AM

Research by the Johnson professor of management is cited in a Business Day story about the complexity of negotiating when several stakeholders are involved

Excerpt from "How to cope when the table gets crowded," (Business Day, Nov. 3)

Negotiations between two sides can be tough enough to manage. Add more parties to the mix, and things get even more complicated. Yet multiparty talks are common: Think of department heads dividing up scarce resources, family members debating the future of a business or a group of consumers launching a class-action lawsuit. Three issues in particular make multiparty negotiations more complex than two-party talks...MORE

Another way to tame the potential chaos of multiparty talks is to create a payoff matrix of parties and interests before talks begin, Professor Elizabeth Mannix of Cornell University wrote in a February 2006 article in Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. A payoff matrix is essentially a spreadsheet that lists the names of the parties in rows, the issues to be discussed in columns and the parties’ priorities on those issues in the boxes that are formed. Priorities can be expressed quantitatively, using a point system of your choosing, or qualitatively – for example, low, medium and high. MORE
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