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Promoting Honesty in Negotiation: An Exercise in Practical Ethics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Peter C. Cramton  and
J. Gregory Dees
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Abstract

In a competitive and morally imperfect world, business people are often faced with serious ethical challenges. Harboring suspicions about the ethics of others, many feel justified in engaging in less-than-ideal conduct to protect their own interests. The most sophisticated moral arguments are unlikely to counteract this behavior. We believe that this morally defensive behavior is responsible, in large part, for much undesirable deception in negotiation. Drawing on recent work in the literature of negotiations, we present some practical guidance on how negotiators might build trust, establish common interests, and secure credibility for their statements, thereby promoting honesty. We also point out the types of social and institutional arrangements, many of which have become commonplace, that work to promote credibility, trust, and honesty in business dealings. Our approach is offered not only as a specific response to the problem of deception in negotiation, but as one model of how research in business ethics might offer constructive advice to practitioners.

…there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation …

      —Niccolo Machiavelli

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

      —George Bernard Shaw

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 359 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1993 

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to Howard Stevenson and Tom Piper for comments, and to the Harvard Business School, the National Science Foundation and the Hoover Institution for support.

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