I have been taking a Coursera course about negotiation recently offered by Yale University. I strongly recommend it as the Barry Nalebuff is a fantastic lecturer and course is highly interactive. 👍

The course will help you to become a better negotiator by developing a framework to analyze and shape negotiations. The framework will allow you to make principled arguments to convince the counter party. Moreover, the framework could allow you to see beneath the surface of apparent conflicts to uncover the underlying interests and benefits.

Before I share the notes of the framework, let’s get started with a sip of wine. 🥂

Here is one of the cases with the best practice of the negotiation framework from the course. You are welcome to try it out and leave comments below. I am willing to hear your thoughts about it! 🤓

Andrea and Beth are dining at a fine restaurant. There is a bottle of 2009 Grgich Hills Chardonnay on the menu and the price is $100. To keep things simple, albeit unrealistic, assume the restaurant only sells whole bottles and this is the only wine they carry.

• Andrea would be willing to pay $110 to drink the whole bottle.
• Andrea would be willing to pay $90 to drink half the bottle.
• Beth would be willing to pay $80 to drink the whole bottle.
• Beth would be willing to pay $50 to drink half the bottle.

They would like to share a bottle if it makes sense to do so (and if they can agree on how to divide the costs). To see if it makes sense, what is the pie, in dollars?

Note: In the past, nearly 90% of learners got this question wrong on the first try. To help you get into the 10%, please take a moment to think through the potential benefit from reaching an agreement and what each party would do absent a deal.

Note: All the materials are shared for learning purpose, originally from Yale University lecturer @ Barry Nalebuff.