1/25/2012
Today in class we did our first negotiation exercise. The exercise was based on a car sale. For this negotiation each of us played a specific role, one person was the seller and the other was the buyer. I was the seller. Each of us were given a scenario that told us which price we needed to either sell the car at or buy the car. The negotiation was then to either sell the car at the highest price or buy the car at the lowest price. During my negotiation with a classmate, we went back and forth and could not come up with an agreement. She wanted to buy my car for less than I would have received if I traded it in. That wouldn't make sense to do and she wasn't willing to spend more so we decided that we weren't going to have a deal. After the exercise we were able to see how each team did in the exercise and also, some students spoke about how they reached an agreement. It shocked me to see some people buying the cars at a price they couldn't afford which meant that they were going to have to take a loan out for the car, as well as seeing people sell the car for lesser amount than they were going to get if they traded it in.
After the negotiation we learned a lot of valuable vocabulary words that linked in with the negotiation process. Terms included: Reservation price which was defined as the highest price you were willing to spend or the most you are willing to spend. Another term that we learned about was BATNA which is the best alternative to negotiated agreement. To go more in depth with that it's the value of the deal that you will have if you reach no agreement. For this exercise my BATNA would be to trade the car in for a potentially lesser value than selling it. Anchoring was a term that really stood out to me. The person who initiated the negotiation is usually anchoring the other party because they get the first say in the price. I witnessed anchoring in this exercise because I felt anchored by my partner when she gave me a really low first offer for my car. I immediately felt that I had to alter my counter offer because I almost felt embarrassed that for asking something too high. Over all this negotiation was a good learned experience and I plan on using the things that I learned in this negotiation for future negotiations.
