Peru Hotel: A multiple level negotiation or how to fight for $1.5 per night

Résumé du document

This story happened this summer. We were seven people, working as relief workers in Peru for a period of two months. We had been in Peru for 10 days. After arriving in Lima, we went to Huancayo, the first city where we studied different projects to invest money in. After one week, we travelled to Huancavelica, the major city of the poorest region in Peru, to stay there for 8 days. After that, we had to move again, and then come back to Huancavelica for 3 days, in order to finalize and implement our project. We arrived by train. After six hours by train, we were exhausted and willing to find a hotel as soon as possible. Our contact in the city, a member of a local NGO, was going to help us find a hotel. We went to the hotel, where the members of our NGO had stayed the year before. We decided to stay there with our backpacks while two of us, a friend and me, were to look in the city for other hotels. After one hour of research and quick negotiations, we found two hotels, a really bad one, at 8 soles per night (3$), and a better, even if not incredible, one at 15 soles per night. On this basis, we negotiated with the hotel we were waiting in, a more comfortable one, but basically much more expensive, being 30 soles per night.

Extraits

[...] The opinions of the two agents are pretty similar, so we will consider the two of us as an entity. Cultural bias The cultural bias is not truly relevant. Before leaving, we thought that the collectivist feature underlined by Hofstede[2] would play a role, but shop and hotels owners are used to deal with foreigners, even in remote areas, and there is no cultural care to take. The negotiation is straightforward. Strategy: Boulwareism: Sure of our strength people, for two stays, plus another group, plus a rather good, if not universally shared, BATNA), we presented everything as a “package”. [...]

[...] : The agents problem 13 The agents interest : 13 The faulty agents problem : 15 El encuentro: 16 Historia de fatalidad: 16 t=1 : perception of the hotel and perception of the customers 16 t=2 : Forcing an employee 16 t=5 : Perception of us by the hotel 16 Weak at the bad moment 16 t=6 : The return of the deadlock 16 Cambia de percepción : what could have been done : 16 Thinking about our perception of the hotel 16 Managing feelings 17 Assymetry of information 17 What must be remembered in this negotiation ? 17 Había una vez The context This story happened this summer. We were seven people, relief workers in Peru for two months. We had been in Peru for 10 days. After arriving in Lima, we went to Huancayo, a first city where we studied different projects in order to invest money in it. [...]

[...] Along the negotiation, our state of mind can be summed up as following. We begin in a competing way. At we are willing to compromise (compromise at 20, which is also a concession for the group, as we will see later) and finish. But the change of mind of the employee put us once more in a competing state of mind, before shifting again to a collaborating strategy at after a discussion together on the whole sense of this negotiation. [...]

[...] But the group was following the negotiation through our eyes. It is therefore difficult to differentiate what is a rational decision following an objective report from an irrational decision following a slightly partial report. Is the agent role to help deciding ? Through this graph, the question can become: are we modifying the decision tree as members of the group, or as agents of this group? The hindsight bias is too strong to give an objective answer. I personally like to think that we “accelerated” decisions that would have been taken, as the final escape. [...]

[...] employee) negotiators are often badly misinformed about Level II (i.e. the group) politics.”, as Robert D. Putnam puts it (op.cit.). It was maybe just a random phenomenon. [...]