Saturday, December 29, 2007

Probability of Success in a Negotiation

How will you rate your chances of success in a negotiation under the following circumstances:


  1. You (the buyer) and the seller both expect the house to be worth something between $300,000 and $285,000, the former also the list price.

  2. Each of you is biased to ward the end that serves your interests

  3. a. There is an agency cost of 6% (typical in the US) or b. there is no agent involved?

I ran a Monte-Carlo simulation on this, and found that with agents the probability goes down to less than 1%, while without agents, there is a ~40% chance that the deal succeeds!


The following figure shows the utility curves for the principals in this simulation. I use Palisades @Risk software for this model.



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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hersh,

It would be interesting to see the results. I. E. Chances of deal succeeding without agents, if the price positioning of the buyer and seller were further apart than the approx 7 % in your illustrative case. Lemme know.

Rikiya@iPhone

Hersh Chaturvedi said...

I did test that Rickya-- I find that as the principals become more flexible (i.e., they work with a broader range), the transactional friction introduced by the agents declines. Great insight! Thanks for your comment.