Course 2024-2025 a.y.

• Foundations of decision making. How to frame problems and objectives. Improving judgement under uncertainty. Alternative decision strategies and their selection.
• When to employ decision teams. Governing team decision making dynamics.
• When to negotiate. Types of conflict of interests and negotiation structures. Types of negotiation strategies. How to improve agreements.
• Power and fairness in negotiations.
• Organizational cultures in negotiations.
• Multi-party negotiations and coalition analysis.

• Distinguish effective and ineffective heuristics for decision making.
• Select a decision strategy appropriate to a problem.
• Recognize different negotiation structures.
• Select negotiation strategies appropriate to the negotiation structure.

• Develop personal skills in problem solving and negotiating.
• Evaluate strategies and behavior applied by other actors.
• Diagnose the key features and address the challenges of decision and negotiation situations.
• Devise appropriate behaviors and design superior solutions and agreements.

• Lectures
• Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
• Practical Exercises
• Individual works / Assignments
• Collaborative Works / Assignments
• Interaction/Gamification

Each session includes an experiment or simulation in which to experiment the strategies and behaviors topic of the session. Conceptualizations and models are reconstructed on the basis of the analysis of the empirical evidence generated by the experiments conducted in class, connected and compared with the available results of  social science research on those behaviors.  Real-life wrap up case studies are discussed for each part of the course.

The course is in presence.

Evaluation – Attending mode

The  ‘grade’ is formed during the course, through points gained through the following assignments:

-  Assignments - Individual Written wrap up  analyses (60%) applied to a case. They evaluate the understanding of key concepts and the capacity to analyse a decision or negotiation situation with them.

- Class participation ( 10%). Relevant  especially for evaluating the learning of behavioral skills and abilities in deciding and negotiating.

- Field projects (30%) : A field project, conducted in teams of maximum 3 members, analyzing a real case of decision and/or negotiation (through interviews, or documental sources as journal reports, books, movies etc;) with the tools learned. Being a mini research project, it evaluates the capacity to identify relevant decision and negotiation issues and of selecting the appropriate theoretical tools for addressing them, in terms of both analysis of empirical processes and design of possible superior solutions.

All team members have to present and ‘defend’ their project orally in one of the last sessions of the course. The written report has to be delivered as a BB assignment.

- A final +1 point for continued contribution during the whole course may be added at the end. If the points cumulated during the course were already 30, this would bring to a 30 cum laude.

Students can opt out from the attending mode of evaluation and turn to a non attending mode during the course, until the formation of teams for the project work. 

Evaluation – Non Attending mode

 Written in-class test based on the adopted material .

 It includes:

-  4/5 open questions relevant for evaluating the knowledge and understanding of the key concepts.

- A brief case to be analyzed applying the concepts, relevant for evaluating the capacity to analyze a decision or negotiation situation with the learned concepts.

Selected  Chapters  (as indicated in the course Syllabus and Available on Library Course Reserve) from:

• A. GRANDORI, Organization and Economic Behaviour, Routledge 2001.
• L.L. THOMPSON, The mind and heart of the negotiator, Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice-Hall 2004.
• Course Slides (posted).