The Bargaining Culture
While we’ve seen various situations of power play and the schematics of the bargaining process in terms of networks and buyer-seller relationships, other outside factors, such as the cultural setting, play a role in the overall impact to the system, particularly in places where haggling is a cultural norm. Professor Ursula Ott explores this theoretical framework in the context of intercultural exchange and interaction in The Influence of Cultural Activity Types on Buyer-Seller Negotiations: A Game Theoretical Framework for Intercultural Negotiations. She discusses the notion of cultural intelligence, citing the effects such awareness and background of the negotiator affect his strategies and other players. Similarly to class discussions, Ott consistently refers back to complete and incomplete information strategies, network power, and the costs of bargaining as constant factors that dominant any bargaining exchange, in spite of the cultural background and differences between players involved.
The research described covers many interesting and refreshing components to network bargaining, such as the timing sensitivity and social conducts of players. Rather than information a negotiator had on the other as portraying in the two-person modelling of the Nash bargaining solution, Ott focused more qualities and personality inherent to the negotiators themselves and examined how different combinations of cultures bargained with one another. Interestingly enough, the paper doesn’t deeply delve into how the socioeconomic background and culture of a negotiator directly impacts his decisions in a bargaining system. For example, in many cultures, haggling for items is expected and the norm, how would someone personally skilled and experienced at haggling bargain different in a network system than one who has rarely or even never had to use such a skill in their daily routine. Ott categorizes cultures into general classifications based on behavioral characteristics: linear-active, multi-active, reactive.and focus, but never really specifies or provides any explanations beyond surface descriptions and a few experimental examples. While this is a very interesting perspective to look at the topic, further research with case studies and investigations can definitely be looked into regarding the randomization of cultural qualities in a bargaining situation as well as withholding information in certain scenarios.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233543153_The_Influence_of_Cultural_Activity_Types_on_Buyer-Seller_Negotiations_A_Game_Theoretical_Framework_for_Intercultural_Negotiations