Negotiation is a specialized and formal version of conflict resolution, most frequently employed when important issues must be agreed upon.
The aim of negotiating is to build a shared environment leading to long-term trust, and it often involves a third, neutral party to extract the issues from the emotions and keep the individuals concerned focused.
Structural, strategic and procedural analysis builds on rational actors, who are able to prioritize clear goals, are able to make trade-offs between conflicting values, are consistent in their behavioral pattern, and are able to take uncertainty into account.
According to structural analysis, negotiations can be described with matrices, such as the Prisoner's dilemma, a concept taken from game theory.
The problem is that the parties can never be sure that the other is going to cooperate, mainly because of two reasons: first, decisions are made at the same time or, second, concessions of one side might not be returned.
Trust may be built only in repetitive games through the emergence of reliable patterns of behavior, such as tit-for-tat.
A considerable amount of research has been devoted to analyses of TPs in single and comparative case studies, as well as experiments.
[3] Precipitating events can be external as when a mediator becomes involved, substantive as when a new idea is proposed, or procedural as when the formal plenary structure becomes divided into committees.
Using this framework in a comparative study of 34 cases, Druckman discovered that external events were needed to move talks on security or arms control toward agreement.
Different patterns were also found for interest-based, cognitive-based, and values-based conflicts[5] and between domestic and international negotiations.
Earlier research showed that TPs are more likely to occur in the context of crises, often in the form of changes that put the talks back on track and transition to a new stage (Druckman, 1986, 2001).
The choice to reframe was shown to occur more frequently among negotiators when their trust is low and transaction costs are high.
Stages may include pre-negotiations, finding a formula of distribution, crest behavior, settlement Bad faith is a concept in negotiation theory whereby parties pretend to reason to reach settlement, but have no intention to do so, for example, one political party may pretend to negotiate, with no intention to compromise, for political effect.