Bacchus Winery

This week we negotiated Bacchus Winery. Sharae and I were representatives from Serbian Steins & Stems. Our negotiation was interest based because we began by stating which issues were our top three most important. We quickly realized that the stock ownership was the most important issue for everyone. Control (seats on the board) and Nikko Raspovliac were top issue for everyone as well. We tried to attack one issue at a time trying to agree on something and it was not happening. Finally someone grouped management staffing, Nikko Raspovliac, and management incentive into a package and asked if we would like package “A” or package “B”. I figured out which gave us the most amount of points and chose package “A”. This was a breath of fresh air because finally we were getting somewhere. Towards the end we weren’t getting quite what we wanted for stock ownership and control so Sharae brilliantly played the role of the bad cop. Her playing the bad cop ended up increasing our number of seats to three and avoiding the 50 point loss. Overall, we totaled 172 points. I’m excited to see the results of other teams.

Connecticut Valley School

This week we negotiated Connecticut Valley School and I was partnered with Zach and we were representing the faculty. We had a very tough time trying to use the information that we were given on our priorities to figure out which projects were most important to us. This was challenging because the priorities that each project could fulfill was open for interpretation. While we were trying to rank the projects in order of importance to us, the headmaster team approached us and tried to form a coalition. I knew right away that they had no idea what our priorities were because in my opinion, we were going against them trying to get the trustees to choose the project most important to us. But, we came to an agreement with the headmasters that we would push for the swimming pool, the hockey rink, and the fine arts building. That way, we got two projects that were important to us and they got two projects that were important to them. Once we agreed to that with the headmasters, Zach and I determined the ranking of importance of each project. Our first priority was the hockey rink roof because it related to our first and second priorities. Next we thought that the women's locker room was important because the information given to us mentioned that it was dirty, which is a concern of health and safety (first priority). Next we chose the computer lab because our third priority was to improve the quality of student life. Also, the information given to everyone about the computer lab specified that the purpose of the lab was to support curricular goals. Our next priority was promoting the school's liberal arts mission which was the fine arts building. The next priorities were not important to us. These were the swimming pool, buses and heating system.

When it came time for the negotiation, the trustees said that they found a way to finance five of the seven projects. We head which projects they were and we were pleased becuase most of the projects were high in our rankings. However, we then got the memo from the Dean of Students stating the safety problem and proposed solution. Since safety is our number one priority, I suggested that we make the campus lighting our number one priority and bump the rest of the projects down one. Unfortuantely, this kicked out the possibility for the women's locker room because we otherwise wouldn't have enough money.

Live 8

This week we completed the online negotiation for live 8. I was the manager of live 8 galleries. I was contacted by the manager of internet development at a company that was interested in proposing a deal to have my domain, live8.org. I said that it was for sale at the right price.

Sharae seemed very hesitant to make the first offer. Therefore, I decided that my aspiration was $1,725,000 to cover the costs of the European expansion and a new website with a domain like www.live8galleries.com or something similar. When Sharae responded, she used an anchoring method by expressing how high the figure was and asked if we could get closer to $500,000. I then decided that I would try for a little more than my reservation price ($566,667). This was my reservation price because I viewed the website as another gallery. If I was going to sell the website, I wanted at least the amount of money it would cost to open a gallery. Since the website that I put together cost a total of $25,000, I thought it would cost about the same to get a new domain name (such as www.live8galleries.com or a play on words that is similar and available). That is how I came to the $600,000 figure that I proposed in response.

Looking back, I wish that I would have probed Sharae for her interests. I think if she would have shared them, we could have created more value by coming to an integrative agreement similar to that of Ben and Emily.