Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions (Second Edition)

Identifying value-creating opportunities requires probing for the underlying interests of each side, rather than playing the traditional game of positional bargaining.

Auction theorists call these kinds of auctions all-pay auctions, because all bidders must pay something, regardless of whether they win the prize. All-pay auctions are bad for bidders and great for sellers.

To bid in a disciplined way, you trade the likelihood of winning against the profits from winning. Some sophisticated dealmakers do this instinctively.

important distinction between commodities, which were appropriate for e-auction, and more complicated goods and services, which were not.

Professor Howard Raiffa’s maximum bid of others (or MBOO, pronounced “maboo”) analysis, which captures the fundamental trade-off in graphical form.

when the number of potential buyers is large, use an auction to maximize value, but beware that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

A negotiation is a mechanism in which the primary source of competitive pressure arises in across-the-table dynamics between buyer and seller.

in the event that someone else (read: Samsung) bid for AuthenTec, Apple could pay $138 million (= 38 percent of the total acquisition price) to acquire a nonexclusive license to certain fingerprint recognition technologies. So, if Apple acquired AuthenTec, Apple could keep the fingerprint technology out of Samsung’s hands; but if Samsung acquired A

The general lesson is to think through what will really happen if there is no deal—not just one step ahead (buy another show) but two or three steps ahead (potential bidding contest). Best-practice BATNA analysis requires constantly asking yourself, “And then what happens?” until you are satisfied that all parties involved have reached stable groun