Negotiating wisely: Considerations based on MCDM/MAUT

Negotiation, both an art and a science, is important in business and in personal life. To negotiate intelligently, we need a strategy to help identify when, for what, and how we should negotiate. We consider a one-to-many negotiation problem such as a house-purchase process in which there is one buyer and many sellers. The alternatives are evaluated using multiple criteria, but only one criterion (such as price) is to be settled by negotiation. We use the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) as a dynamic measure of negotiating strength, and develop a systematic quantitative iterative approach to assist in the negotiation process. We explore using simulation the efficacy of negotiating for more than one alternative at the same time. The objective of our approach is to help a negotiator achieve a good, hopefully an optimal, result effectively.