The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everyone

The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everyone

This work is intended as a tool for securing a satisfying, even gratifying, outcome to difficult and complex negotiations. It facilitates the equitable and efficient division of a contested set of goods and the settlement of a dispute without time-consuming haggling or an expensive lawsuit. It removes the risk of one of the parties losing to a more skilled bargainer and allows both rivals to feel that they have won more than half of what was available in a dispute. Beginning wth simple fair-division techniques, the book builds towards a path-breaking procedure that gives equitable, envy-free and efficient solution to a wide range of disputes. This procedure, called "adjusted winner", can be applied broadly, from divorce to business to international disputes. Built on a simple point-allocation system, it is as easy to apply as it is to understand, and produces, in a short time, resolutions that have taken expert negotiators weeks and months to work out. The authors present a compelling system that is not only fair but also guarantees that both parties walk away with as much of the "win-win" potential as possible.