From a traditional moral point of view, business practitioners often seem overly concerned about the behavior of their peers in deciding how they ought to act. We propose to account for this concern by introducing a mutual trust perspective, where moral obligations are grounded in a sense of trust that others will abide by the same rules. When grounds for trust are absent, the obligation is weakened. We illustrate this perspective by examining the widespread ambivalence with regard to deception about one's settlement preferences in negotiation. On an abstract level, such deception generally seems undesirable, though in many individual cases it is condoned, even admired as shrewd bargaining. Because of the difficulty in verifying someone's settlement preferences, it is hard to establish a basis for trusting the revelations of the other party, especially in competitive negotiations with relative strangers.
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Paper provided by University of Maryland, Department of Economics - Peter Cramton in its series Papers of Peter Cramton with number
91beq.
Length: 33 pages Date of creation: 1991 Date of revision:
09 Jun 1998 Publication status: Published in Business Ethics Quarterly, 1:2, April 1991, pages 135-167. Handle: RePEc:pcc:pccumd:91beq
Contact details of provider: Postal: Economics Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7211 Phone: (202) 318-0520 Fax: (202) 318-0520 Web page: http://www.cramton.umd.edu
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Find related papers by JEL classification: C78 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information M29 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Business Economics - - - Other
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Lawrence M. Ausubel & Peter Cramton & Raymond J. Deneckere, 2002.
"Bargaining with Incomplete Information,"
Papers of Peter Cramton
02barg, University of Maryland, Department of Economics - Peter Cramton, revised 12 Mar 2001.
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