Negotiation, Nudge and Anchor. How to obtain hundreds $ discount on a long-term rental car in US.

Theory defines the negotiation as a joint decision-making process between two or more interdependent parties, with preferences and interests of opportunistic nature and partially in conflict. This process can finish with an agreement.

Anchoring trap happens when you will estimate the magnitude of something by adding or subtracting a little from known magnitudes; so if you are in a town with 3 million you will calculate the population of the next town a bit bigger or smaller to yours. Anchors serve as nudges. We can influence the figure someone else will choose in a particular situation by ever-so-subtly suggesting a starting point for our thought process.

At the starting point of my experience in the United States I needed a car, I live outside Washington DC, the closest grocery store is 2-3 miles away and there is no public transport serving the neighborhood. So I started calling rental companies to find a good deal on a long-term rental car for the length of my stay in US. The lowest price they all said to me was around 850-900 $ per month, obtained negotiating without an anchor (and a Best Alternative). Then I started looking at the web, but the prices were around 750 $, then I found a deal on priceline.com for 650 $, but I had to go very far to take the car (around 100$ of cab…).

Then I tried to negotiate with this anchor with my first calls, and I discovered that when I called a previous 900$ rental agency saying I had an alternative for 650$ they lower their price close to that! So, as a good Italian, I started cheating!

I called the closest rental agency and gave them the anchor of 500$ and they lower their initial from 800$ to 510$, so I beat the priceline.com.

I used an anchor price to nudge the other negotiator.

Disagreeable Men Earn More Than Nice Guys

People who are disagreeable earn more than people who are agreeable, and the gap is biggest among men, according to an analysis of four surveys spanning almost 20 years. Men who are significantly less agreeable than average earn 18.3% more than men who are significantly more agreeable than average, while the comparable figure for women is 5.47%, says the study, led by Beth A. Livingston of Cornell University and presented at a recent meeting of the Academy of Management. Men's disagreeable behavior "conforms to expectations of 'masculine' behavior," the authors say.

Source: Do nice guys finish last? They certainly are a distant second when it comes to earnings

Will Apple Organization Structure resist to Steve Job's resigning?

The "change" is an unavoidable characteristic of every organization.  Things change, people changes, world changes, organizations change.

Steve Jobs, after the launch of the iPad, said about the Apple's DNA:


Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.

Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices...that need to be even easier to use than a PC, that need to be even more intuitive than a PC; and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

We think we are on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon but in the organization to build these kinds of products."



Does Apple have the "right architecture in the organization" to serially continue to compete in this world? The collection of evidence begins today.


Will Jobs's greatest creation be any Apple product or will it be Apple itself?