Never Say No: The Law, Economics, and Psychology of Counteroffers

Ian Ayres

No ah4rc_v1, LawArchive from Center for Open Science

Abstract: It is such an honor to speak to you, especially since compared to the titans who have given the Schwartz Lecture in the past, I feel like an ADR manqué. I am going to proceed, nonetheless, and discuss the impact of counteroffers on negotiation. And I am going to try to convince you of four central claims: - Legal claim: The counteroffer is governed by what I will call the "blow-up rule," which is a rare kind of double-jointed default. - Informational claim: Offerees are the first people to know when there are gains of trade. - Channeling claim: The blow-up rule dampens the incentive of offerees to inefficiently counter. - Psychological claim: Rejection aversion and other behavioral "biases" tend to cause people to reject offers too often. These counteroffer claims join together two disparate obsessions that I have with legal default rules and information forcing. The last claim even gives me a chance to indulge my penchant for why-not experimentation, where I have tried to put into practice the never-say-no attitude.

Date: 2010-01-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/67b4a503cc2f164801a54cc1/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:lawarc:ah4rc_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/ah4rc_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LawArchive from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().