International Negotiations

Essay on International Negotiations

First lecture

Today we started our first lecture. It was the first time that I had a course without having an exam at the end of the course. Therefore, I didn’t know what to expect of the course. On forehand I already read something about the course and knew that we had to make a couple of essays. That these would be reflective I was not aware off.

The class started with an introduction on what to expect of the course, the first part would be about the basic concepts off negotiations. We would learn about a framework on how to negotiate rationally. Although we didn’t do it in the first lecture, I’m sure this will help me on making decisions.

We started with some practice exercises. I was completely surprised by the first exercise. We were handed a question about mutual funds. After I read it, I had no clue on what the answer was. All I thought was that 200 would be a considerable amount. If there is a gap in the market, then everyone will try to make profit out of that. I couldn’t believe that there were more than these 200 funds that would have doubled. So I just, out of the blue, answered 50. It was hard to find the actual meaning of this exercise so I didn’t know what to answer. The second question was a more clear decision for me. Still I didn’t have a clue on what the meaning of these questions were. But I decided that I would find it hard to decide which two of the three plants would have to shut down, so I decided to take the risk.

The third exercise was a long one. After a couple of minutes I was done reading but I forgot a part of the story. The difference is that I always mark the things I find most important. In this case it was the market price, and the break-even price. The $32 dollars the translator sort of slipped through was actually less important to me, because that could have been about anything. Maybe their selling price or anything else. So I just focused on the other two. The $10 was the lowest price...