Negotiation Management, Analysis and Support
Distributive Negotiations		3
Single issue negotiations

Definitions (informal)

• Negotiations over the division (distribution) of a given amount of a good; bargaining over a fixed pie.
• Negotiators claim resources; they want to divide "the pie" and each wants a bigger share.
• Competitive negotiations when one party wants to achieve more at the expense of the other party.

Distributive bargaining situations may involve a single or many issues. They may may involve two or more parties.

Traditionally it has been often assumed that:

What one party gains the other party loses and vice versa.
Win-lose situation: when one side gets more, the other gets less.

This need not be the case when the negotiation situations are complex;

even in distributive negotiations each party may want more, and yet each may obtain more within a given range (size of the pie).

This is because the three informal definitions are not equivalent to the two assumptions.

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