Class imitating life or vice versa

I was McColl the entire day on Friday’s for negotiations class. It meets for an entire day on Friday and for three Fridays. The class consists mainly of lecture and negotiations exercises. On Friday’s afternoon exercise, we were divided into teams of three, each team consisted of a buyer, a seller, and an observer. The buyer was to approach the seller with an offer to purchase his ranch. Unknown to the seller, the buyer was purchasing on behalf of an oil company which had determined that the land was sitting on an oil field and had already purchased three other ranches adjacent to the location. The seller had similar information about his land that was unknown to the buyer and affected his reservation price. It was the job of the buyer and the seller to spend forty five minutes questioning one another and negotiate a mutually agreed upon price in front of the observer, who had access to information on both sides and whose job it was to take notes and critique the players. The only rule governing the players was that we were not allowed to lie, but were encouraged to be creative in answering any question that would weaken our positions.

 

My role on Friday was that of a buyer and spent the first ten minutes answering the seller’s questions as to why I was approaching him out of the blue to buy his ranch. But I managed to turn the tables when I started negotiating and began by low balling my seller with a very low offer of $950 an acre. We eventually agreed upon a price of $2999, which later turned out to be the lowest price among all the negotiators in my class.

 

So imagine my shock I got home that evening and read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a scenario almost identical to the one we acted out in class that afternoon. A millionaire sent his representatives to a small town in Texas to discreetly purchase large tracts of land. Only in this scenario it is not an oil company interested in building an oil field but the founder of the world’s largest online retailer wanting to build a landing strip for space flights.