
Lecture 9: Negotiation
Ian Ball continues MIT's 14.12 Economic Applications of Game Theory with a lecture on negotiation as an application of backward induction. He develops the theory through two worked examples: settlement bargaining before a pre-trial hearing, where each side weighs litigation costs against expected court outcomes, and price haggling between a buyer and seller with private information about their valuations. The session builds up the extensive-form reasoning step by step, showing how offers and counteroffers can be solved by working backward from the final possible move to determine what rational parties would agree to earlier. Runtime is 74 minutes, consistent with a full class session, and the lecture assumes familiarity with backward induction from earlier sessions in the course. It is aimed at students who already have the basic game theory toolkit and want to see it applied to realistic bargaining situations.