Resources
Additional readings will be posted here after each class.
One
Cementownia Odra is a real place. Check out their website! Football (in the US, soccer) fans may be interested in knowing that Miroslav Klose, the great German striker, was born in Opole.
For more on deal making, see David Lax and James K. Sebenius (2006), 3-d Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (Harvard Business School Publishing).
The Warren Buffett story is chronicled in Roger Lowenstein's (1996) very good book on Buffett: Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. Bill Gates writes about the nontransitive dice in a Harvard Business Review article (Jan-Feb 1996). OF COURSE, Gates wasn't fooled, and Gates indicated that the lesson to be learned here is that it is important to understand probabilities. That might be true, but that's not the lesson of the case. The lesson is that you don't need to understand probabilities; you just need to understand Warren Buffett (and that he is smart and a profit maximizer). Here is one other internet resource.
Two
We also talked about difficulties in communication. For an accessible article on perspective taking and ambiguity, see Keysar, Boaz (2007). "Communication and miscommunication: The role of egocentric processes." Intercultural Pragmatics 4, no. 1: 71-84. For a more general discussion of communication, see Steven Pinker's book: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
I didn't get to show your the Golden Balls (i.e., Split of Steal) clip, but it is found here. Another amusing clip (called the "weirdest split or steal ever") is found here. This particular segment got picked up by the radio show RadioLab. It is also discussed by one of my favorite spots columnists, the brilliant Joe Posnanski. Click here if you are interested in Thaler's paper on that show.
If you are interested in testing ability to detect lines, take the online test, courtesy of my colleague Nick Epley. The best accessible introduction to the literature on lie detection is Paul Ekman's (2009) Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. The valid cues for telling lies are: speech hesitation (the notes are incorrect: I meant to put down facial movements), changes in pitch, speech errors, response length, blinking, pupil dilation, touching self. Tom Gilovich of Cornell has conducted some interesting studies on lying. Gilovich was demonstrating an effect he called the "illusion of transparency", the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others can discern their intial states. In this study, 1 of 5 participants was told to be a liar. It turned out that judges were random at identifying the liar, getting that person correct only 25.6% of the time (chance is 20%). Interestingly, liars thought that 48.8% of judges would identify them as the liar.
The emotion detection task ("Reading the mind in the eyes") is also available online on the New York Times. The task is somewhat controversial, with some arguing that it is gender-biased and some arguing that it really does not reveal that autistics are worse at reading faces (argument: it is a test of emotion recognition as well as of vocabulary recognition and comprehension). One other issue is that these are not really emotions--they are actors and actresses expressing emotion. Beyond that, we do not actually know what emotion or feeling the actors or actresses are trying to convey. The correct answer is a consensus judgment of a panel of experts.
The classic article on active listening is Rogers, Carl R., and F. J. Roethlisberger. "Barriers and gateways to communication." ClassiCs Compendium (1952): 13 (reprinted in Harvard Business Review in 1991). Two of the best discussions of using active listening in negotiation are William Ury (1993), Getting Past No and Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and Roger Fisher (2010), Difficult Conversations.
I didn't get to tell you the story about Moses Malone, but if you are intersted see Donald Dell's (2009) great negotiation book, Never Make the First Offer: (Except When You Should) Wisdom from a Master Dealmaker.
Three
For an article about James Hogue, the basis for Marty Williams' article, see this New York TImes article.