Does the Ayres Study Work in Istanbul?

istanbulAs I wrote about last week, I was at a negotiation conference in Istanbul in which participants were given assignments to negotiate in the Spice Market.  Melissa Manwaring, who used to work with the Program on Negotiation and is now a professor at Babson College, came up with the great idea of each person from her group of five going into a shop and asking for the price of the same item to see if there were significant differences.  Think of this as the Ayres study on car dealerships done in Turkey over jewelry boxes. 

In Ian Ayres’ famous study of car dealerships in Chicago, it appeared that white men got the best (lowest) opening price for their cars, while black women got the worst opening bids.  In Melissa’s group, there was a wonderful mix of an older white male American (Howard Gadlin), Melissa herself (white female younger American), a young ethnic Chinese man (Andrew Lee), and two native Turkish speakers, so this was a great gender and ethnic mix to test.  

It turns out that this group found exactly the opposite of what Ayres found. 

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Adventure Learning in Turkey

istanbul-150x150I just returned from a conference in Istanbul, which was the second of three conferences on the next generation of negotiation teaching. It was fascinating; and I will have several posts in the next few days about different pieces of it. One of the most interesting concepts behind this conference was the opportunity to take advantage of the city itself, to take advantage of a negotiation culture completely unlike the US one, and to go into the Spice Market and Grand Bazaar to have some fun while learning about the negotiation culture here. I will have several stories from this experience. The first is my important negotiation for soccer jerseys for my boys. (I have for many years used soccer jerseys from around the world as the standard gift for my sons. In some places—France, Spain—this has led to classic department store purchases. In others—Italy, Bosnia, Croatia, Israel—this leads to bargaining with vendors in tourist squares.) I have a general process that I use for negotiation that I was curious to test again in Istanbul.

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Brown v. Board of Education as a Disputing Process Lesson

supreme courtLast week, we were privileged to hear Professor Michael Klarman speak on “Why Brown v. Board of Education Was a Hard Case.”  This was one of the most enjoyable and interesting talks I have heard in a long time.  I highly recommend it, and you can click here to get the webcast.  My guess is that this would still be as funny and insightful on the audio.   There were two particular points that he made in reviewing the history of the case that linked to conflict resolution theory that I want to highlight here.

First, Klarman noted that, contrary to typical practice, the justices facing the Brown decision did not take a straw poll at their first conference discussing the case.  In fact, as he notes, by his count, there would have been only four votes to overturn Plessy at the beginning and nothing near the unanimity that the Court presented in its decision the following year.  What was the import of not taking this poll?  As Klarman notes, this allowed the justices to change their mind and to preserve fluidity in their thinking.  In other words, the justices did not lock themselves into an opening position that then they would feel necessary to defend throughout the discussions. 

The impact of publicly locking yourself in to an opening position is problematic, as we know. 

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