Much of the materials with the tag bfa comes from the Bargaining for Advantage book.
There exist several norms and standards. Examples:
- Paying interest on loans.
- Kelly’s Blue Book Value for pricing vehicles
- First come, first served.
- Profitability
- Seniority
- Productivity
Know the relevant standards and try to frame your goal with those standards. This will make you seem less selfish and more fair. It makes your position more defendable.
Know your counterpart’s standards, and use them! Using your own standards will shift the discussion to which standards should apply.
If you cannot use their standard, be prepared with a reason why your stance is a legitimate exception to the standard. Attack the standard as a last resort.
Consistency Trap: The opponent will precommit you to a standard, and then show you by that standard, your position is contrarian. Be prepared for this. A typical hint that this is occurring: They try to get you to agree to a general statement. Or they ask leading questions.
Competitive people favor consistency traps.
When asked a leading question, get the other party to explain the relevance. If pressured, qualify the statement, and refine it in your own words, using the broadest language possible.
If you fall into the trap, claim you made a mistake by agreeing than to adjust your position.
Sometimes you cannot attain or frame your goals via their standards. You can try attacking the standard, but this frequently does not work. It is better to find a third party who is sympathetic to your norms and who the counterpart is answerable to.
As an example, consider Gandhi’s train ride story in South Africa. He bought a ticket and sat in a carriage of a train reserved for whites only. He dressed respectably, and picked a compartment with a similarly dressed white person. When the conductor tried to force him out, the white person defended Gandhi. Gandhi achieved this by trying to relate to the white passenger (dressing similarly).
Standards such as “authors get 15%” or “real estate agents get 6%” exist in attempts to eliminate negotiation (and to smooth the process). The industry felt that negotiating every case individually is costly and wasteful, so they created a standard. Do not attack established standards without a strong position, and not until you are a strong negotiator.
Other than the institutionalized standards like in the previous paragraph, most norms are negotiable up to a certain point. However, if advocating a deviation from the standards, it is critical to have data to support your position!
Come up with a good “positional theme”: A simple slogan that describes your problem (e.g. “Part time America won’t work” was one used in negotiations with employers). When the going gets tough, it really helps to emphasize this theme.
Deference to authority can come up: Beware of it. An example is a dense contract which they insist is “standard”. Or they invoke “company policy”. Do not defer to authority just because they claim it is a standard.