PON Live! The MIT AI Negotiation Competition: Negotiation Theory Meets AI
The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is pleased to present:
PON Live!
The MIT AI Negotiation Competition: Negotiation Theory Meets AI
A virtual talk with:
Jared Curhan
Gordon Kaufman Professor of Management and
Professor of Work and Organization Studies
MIT Sloan School of Management
Executive Committee Member and Vice Chair of Research
Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
Monday, April 14, 2025
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET (US and Canada)
Free and open to the public.
Click to access the Zoom registration link.
The session will be recorded. Pending faculty approval, we will post the recording on this page after the session.
About the talk:
Inspired by Robert Axelrod’s famous Evolution of Cooperation tournament from 1984, the MIT AI Negotiation Competition enlisted negotiation experts, students, and faculty from over 50 countries to prompt large language models (LLMs) to engage in various integrative and distributive negotiation tasks. Their challenge was to maximize value claiming (proportion of resources captured), value creation (joint benefit), and subjective value (counterpart satisfaction). A round-robin design involving thousands of negotiations yielded a rich and multifaceted dataset. Preliminary findings suggest that, as in Axelrod’s original tournaments, “nice” strategies play a surprisingly pivotal role in objective and subjective negotiation outcomes. This presentation will share key results, highlighting innovative prompts developed by the competition’s winners and examining broader theoretical implications for negotiation and AI.
About the speaker:
Jared Curhan is the Gordan Kaufman Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as Faculty Director of MIT’s Behavioral Research Lab. Curhan specializes in the psychology of negotiation and conflict resolution. A recipient of support from the National Science Foundation, he has pioneered a social psychological approach to the study of “subjective value” in negotiation—that is, the feelings and judgments concerning the instrumental outcome, the process, the self, and the relationship. His research uses the Subjective Value Inventory (SVI; Curhan et al., 2006) to examine the precursors, processes, and long-term consequences of subjective value in negotiation. He also studies the dynamics of negotiation and brainstorming.
Curhan is Vice Chair for Research and a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. He is also the Director of the PON Research Lab and MIT’s Negotiation for Executives Program.
Curhan founded the Program for Young Negotiators, Inc., an organization dedicated to promoting negotiation training in primary and secondary schools. His book, Young Negotiators (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) has been used to train more than 35,000 children across the United States and abroad to achieve their goals without the use of violence.
Curhan has received the Stanford University Lieberman Fellowship for excellence in teaching and university service, MIT’s Institute-wide teaching award, the MIT Teaching with Technology Award, and MIT Sloan’s Jamieson Prize for excellence in teaching.
Accommodation Statement:
The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation(s) for persons with disabilities in connection with its programs and activities. Accommodations must not fundamentally alter applicable PON programming and are not retroactive.
Event participants should request accommodations at least two weeks prior to the start date of a program or event, as accommodations may take time to implement. Please note that PON will make every effort to secure services, but these are subject to availability.
To request accommodations please e-mail ponevents@law.harvard.edu.
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