4 ms·

> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases...However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult You can hire these pe

> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases...However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. As the founder of Spanx said "hire your weaknesses" [1]. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/interview-how-spanx-became-billion-dollar-undergarment-empire http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/int...

lsc 12y ago
>You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. This is easier for some specialties than others. For example, if you want to hire someone who is good at negotiation, if they are actually good at negotiation, they should be able to extract as compensation the majority of the value they add. If you are especially bad at negotiation, or if it's difficult to tell exactly how much value they are adding, it's possible for them to extract more value as compensation than they are adding to the transaction.
- eru 12y ago
  That's why you need to multiple people who are good at negotiation to compete with each other for your bid.
  - lsc 12y ago
    That is, of course, a great idea if you can make it work. However, for that to work, you need to have a well-delineated task; you need all your bidders to be bidding on the same thing. Let us take the very simple case of real-estate. "Sell my house, you get 3% of the total selling price." (well, traditionally, the seller pays 6%, but 3% goes to the buyer's agent, which to me makes it seem like the buyer's agent actually works for the seller, as, well, it's the seller doing the paying.) But anyhow, let's focus on the seller's agent, as like I said, the buyer's agent has a interest in seeing to it that the deal goes down quickly, easily, and that there aren't legal issues later, but they don't have any interest in negotiating a lower price for the buyer, except to the extent that doing so could make the deal go through faster. So say I want to sell my house. There are some agents that will sell my house for 2%, or even 1%. why haven't those agents dominated the market? do the agents who take 3% negotiate higher prices for the buyer? The point here is that professional negotiators have set up systems where it's hard for you to send out requests for bids on standardized tasks, because such a system would lower their compensation. I used the real-estate market as an example, because there is a very standard compensation system, but it is largely divorced from (and in fact opposed to, from the buyer's side) the "hey you, here's some money, get me the best price." task that I would like to pay them for. note, I'm not saying that it's impossible to hire a negotiator... I'm just saying that it's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Hiring a negotiator is dramatically more difficult than hiring someone who performs a well-defined task. Now, I'm with you, though, in that when you can reduce that negotiation task down to something standard you can put out bids on, you are going to do very well. I'm just saying that reducing that negotiation task down to something like that can quite often be a difficult task in and of itself.
    - eru 12y ago
      I wonder how Britain differs from the US to make much lower real estate transaction fees possible there.

lsc 12y ago

>You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. This is easier for some specialties than others. For example, if you want to hire someone who is good at negotiation, if they are actually good at negotiation, they should be able to extract as compensation the majority of the value they add. If you are especially bad at negotiation, or if it's difficult to tell exactly how much value they are adding, it's possible for them to extract more value as compensation than they are adding to the transaction.

eru 12y ago
That's why you need to multiple people who are good at negotiation to compete with each other for your bid.
- lsc 12y ago
  That is, of course, a great idea if you can make it work. However, for that to work, you need to have a well-delineated task; you need all your bidders to be bidding on the same thing. Let us take the very simple case of real-estate. "Sell my house, you get 3% of the total selling price." (well, traditionally, the seller pays 6%, but 3% goes to the buyer's agent, which to me makes it seem like the buyer's agent actually works for the seller, as, well, it's the seller doing the paying.) But anyhow, let's focus on the seller's agent, as like I said, the buyer's agent has a interest in seeing to it that the deal goes down quickly, easily, and that there aren't legal issues later, but they don't have any interest in negotiating a lower price for the buyer, except to the extent that doing so could make the deal go through faster. So say I want to sell my house. There are some agents that will sell my house for 2%, or even 1%. why haven't those agents dominated the market? do the agents who take 3% negotiate higher prices for the buyer? The point here is that professional negotiators have set up systems where it's hard for you to send out requests for bids on standardized tasks, because such a system would lower their compensation. I used the real-estate market as an example, because there is a very standard compensation system, but it is largely divorced from (and in fact opposed to, from the buyer's side) the "hey you, here's some money, get me the best price." task that I would like to pay them for. note, I'm not saying that it's impossible to hire a negotiator... I'm just saying that it's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Hiring a negotiator is dramatically more difficult than hiring someone who performs a well-defined task. Now, I'm with you, though, in that when you can reduce that negotiation task down to something standard you can put out bids on, you are going to do very well. I'm just saying that reducing that negotiation task down to something like that can quite often be a difficult task in and of itself.
  - eru 12y ago
    I wonder how Britain differs from the US to make much lower real estate transaction fees possible there.