Entrevista a profundidad a Andrés Chinchay

BOSTON. A Harvard Business School student won the highest grade in part of his Competitive Decision Making course because “I was willing to lie to get a better score.”

That reaction is just fine with Prof. Howard R. Raiffa, whose course is aimed at teaching would- be business executives to negotiate in the real world. Like it or not, Prof. Raiffa says, lying or “strategic misrepresentation,” as he calls it, is sometimes resorted to in business negotiations. Each week, Prof. Raiffa and his students play a game. He pairs them off and assigns them roles in a negotiation. One week a big-city mayor and a police-union leader bargain over a contract. An- other week, a plaintiff and an insurance company try to reach a settlement. Next time, one executive tries to buy a company from another. The students negotiate outside the classroom during the week, then report the results.

The results determine the grade. The mayor who

held the police union to the smallest wage-and- benefit package gets the best grade among the mayors; the police union chief who negotiated with him gets the worst grade among the union leaders. Students find that hiding certain facts, bluffing or even outright lying often gains them a better deal. But the objective isn’t necessarily to teach them to lie. Rather, Prof. Raiffa says, it is to teach them they may be lied to. Raiffa thinks the students become “much more aware.” “They’re very naive when they start,” he claims.

One-third of the course grade is based on suc- cess in the negotiating games. For ambitious, ag- gressive students, the pressure to win is intense, and the course evokes strong reactions. During one class discussion of a game, a woman burst into

tears. She had discovered that the man she negoti- ated with, who repeatedly assured her he opposed any misrepresentation, had in fact lied blatantly. Another student, who has worked for Arabian American Oil Co. in Saudi Arabia negotiating con- struction contracts, said he found the students here less reasonable than the people he dealt with in the business world.

Raiffa doesn’t tell his students how to negotiate in any particular game. The students develop their own strategies and methods as they go along. Part of the course is theoretical; students learn how to analyze competitive situations. But to Raiffa and most of his students, the actual negotiations are the heart of the course.

“You learn a lot about negotiating and a lot about yourself,” says a lawyer who put in a year as counsel to a congressional subcommittee before taking the course.

Raiffa says he structures the negotiations so that in some of the early games, “the truth teller is at an extreme disadvantage” against someone who lies or bluffs. In later games, liars may lose a chance to reach a profitable settlement because their oppo- nent is outraged and becomes more stubborn. “People have to learn to understand the nature of the game,” Raiffa says, “and understand how they are vulnerable.”

Many students are surprised at the amount of lying, claiming that while some people never mis- represent their position, others do it pathologically. Another student, who was a research assistant at Harvard before coming to the business school, says that attitudes toward Lying changed during the se- mester. “There was a period when it seemed as if everyone was Lying. It wasn’t bluffing; it was out- right Lying,” she says. “I did it too.”

This student says the experience taught her that peer pressure can overcome personal ethics. Since she doesn’t want to lie, she plans to avoid fields where she thinks dishonesty is commonplace. Another member of the class, who had worked for the National Park Service, says she preserved her ethical standards, but only at the cost of losing in several negotiations with people who lied. Deeply disturbed, she went to Prof. Raiffa to dis- cuss the course and her future in business. “I con- cluded there are businesses I’d better not go into,” she says. “I’m not willing to compromise my prin- ciples to the point of boldfaced lying.”

Some students say that lying in the course is ac- ceptable while that lying outside isn’t. But most students feel that the way they play the games does reflect what techniques they’ll be using in their careers.

To what extent is misdirection during negotiation a mutually destructive process? Would all (or most?) parties be better off if only truthful information could be exchanged? Ask yourself whether any legal mechanisms seem to address these questions or, indeed, whether society attempts to provide extralegal “psychological” incentives not to dissimulate. Finally, bear in mind the possibility that dissimulation may not be an optimal long-term policy in an iterated or repetitious negotiating game, especially where parties have some control over whom one “plays” with.

QUESTIONS

1. Do most bilateral negotiations or trades broadly fit the paradigm of the Chicken game? Illustrate your answer with respect to the used car sale example in the text above.

2. What application of the models in this chapter is there to negotiations designed to reach out-of-court settlements?

3. Do threats of suit frequently fall into the mold of the Chicken paradigm? Can you give some (other) examples from the legal environment?

4. Is it desirable to be able to “rely” on what someone else tells you? What costs are incurred if it is impossible to rely on information proffered? Are there any legal mechanisms designed to ensure the reliability of information used in arriving at bargains?

5. How do bargainers invest resources in making their bargaining stances credible (even when they are fundamentally untrue)? Is this an “unprofitable” process in some overall sense?

6. What is the distinction between what the Harvard professor called “strategic misrepresentation” and what the law calls fraud?