In law school, I had a 'how to negotiate' workshop once. We were given a fictitious deal to negotiate (with some external circumstances hidden from us), were pa

In law school, I had a 'how to negotiate' workshop once. We were given a fictitious deal to negotiate (with some external circumstances hidden from us), were paired up with a random person and then had 15 minutes to execute in the hallway. The second I got my numbers, I started building some sort of game theory model around the circumstances in my head, filling in some numbers and scenarios, all while stalling the girl opposite to me so that I had more time to work on my 'optimal strategy'. So then in the last 3 minutes or so, I 'executed' on my theory and we both got our negotiated numbers. The girl looked rather bored and played a bit dumb, giving out the feeling of 'I'll let you have this one, what do I care.' Well the result is easy to predict - after the hidden circumstances and our respective numbers were revealed, it turned out she had basically steamrolled me and any smugness I might have had about my rational approach and winning strategy was crushed. I stopped doing any formal analysis of real world decision making after that.