Henner Gimpel - Böcker

This motivation drives the research fields of market engineering and information management.With this book, the editors and authors honor Professor Dr. Christof Weinhardt for his enormous and ongoing contribution to market engineering and information management research and practice.

This motivation drives the research fields of market engineering and information management.With this book, the editors and authors honor Professor Dr. Christof Weinhardt for his enormous and ongoing contribution to market engineering and information management research and practice.

Negotiations are ubiquitous in business, politics, and private life. In many cases their outcome is of great importance. Yet, negotiators frequently act irrationally and fail to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Cognitive biases like overconfidence, egocentrism, and the mythical fixed pie illusion oftentimes foreclose profitable results. A further cognitive bias is the attachment effect: Parties are influenced by their subjective expectations formed on account of the exchange of offers, they form reference points, and loss aversion potentially leads to a change of preferences when expectations change.This book presents a motivation, formalization, and substantiation of the attachment effect. Thereby, preferences and behavior are approached from a microeconomic and a psychological perspective. Two experiments show clear evidence for a systematic bias. The results can be used for prescriptive advice to negotiators: either for debiasing or to systematically affect the counterparty.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar “Negotiation and Market Engineering” held for one week in November 2006, in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. The papers were submitted for publication in this book and reviewed after the seminar. The seminar was a meeting point for participants from academia and industry who arrived from four continents to discuss research on negotiations, auctions, and markets as well as their application. Analyzing, designing, and introducing such complex systems as negotiations, auctions, and markets inevitably requires an interdisciplinary approach because of their psychological, social, and cultural character; economic, legal, and political aspects; quantitative and qualitative considerations; and strategic, tactical, and managerial perspectives. Thus the organizers of the seminar paid special attention to having a mix of researchers with diverse backgrounds from various disciplines – the most common disciplines represented at the seminar were computer science, information systems, economics, business administration, and mathematics. Despite the foundation in different disciplines, during the seminar it became apparent that the different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies used to assess negotiations, auctions, and markets were highly interrelated and an excellent tool box to achieve a holistic view on the object of research. Although this was not unexpected, the success of the seminar and its interdisciplinary exchange of ideas gave further encouragement for the persual of research without confinement by traditional boundaries of disciplines.