Editor's Note Open Access

With this issue, Negotiation Journal introduces a novel feature entitled “State of the Art,” which we expect to become a regular resource for our readers. Writing under this banner, researchers and practitioners will synthesize important developments in specific disciplines and areas that have relevance for our understanding of negotiation and conflict resolution. In one issue, the focus might be on sociology; in another, it might be economics, labor relations, or diplomacy. Whatever the topic, “State of the Art” pieces will alert readers to important new concepts, findings, and challenges. We especially hope that negotiation teachers will see them as valuable readings for their students. We also hope that would‐be writers will volunteer to cover their particular domains.

We are off to a flying start thanks to Hallam Movius and Timothy D. Wilson's contribution, “How We Feel about the Deal.” In it they weave together insights from recent psychological findings on the instability of our likes and dislikes. If what we covet today may bore us tomorrow, perhaps we should be more careful about what we work to achieve in negotiation.

By contrast, Harborne W. Stuart, Jr.'s “Value Creation: A Coordination Game” looks back to reexamine a foundational concept in negotiation analysis, namely, the supposed tension between creating and claiming value. We all know from everyday experience that self‐interested parties often do generate mutual gains through constructive trading, but some game theoretic models have been read as proving that, in a rational world, hard bargaining trumps collaboration. Stuart, however, argues that the assumptions on which the classic prisoner's dilemma rest do not apply in many negotiation situations. Thus, the value‐creating bumblebee really can fly in both practice and theory.

In their article in this issue on “The Chocolate Conundrum: A Simple Simulation of a Canonical Management Problem,” Pacey C. Foster and John Richardson also take a look back at game theory to describe an engaging classroom exercise. Their offspring of familiar iterative prisoner's dilemma games has some interesting structural twists, including the fact that the particular outcomes are edible.

Also in this issue, a research report by Uta Herbst and Sabine Schwarz indicates that the rewards of such exercises are not just short‐term sugar highs. In fact, by comparing the performance of untrained subjects, trained negotiation students, and experienced professionals in common exercises, they found good news on two fronts. First, trained students and professionals both outperformed novices. Good teaching does indeed pay off. Second, the authors argue that such results should give us more confidence in the results of laboratory studies that use trained student subjects, as such students may, in fact, serve as adequate proxies for professionals.

Beyond the classroom and the lab, this issue of Negotiation Journal also provides real‐world examples of both value creation and value destruction. For the former, look to Joel Cutcher‐Gershenfeld's careful analysis of 2007 negotiations between Ford and the United Auto Workers when the viability of both the company and the union was at stake. The process was complex (more than three‐hundred people were directly involved) and never easy, but ultimately has important implications for many types of negotiations within industries undergoing transformation.

In his article, Doron Pely examines a setting in which the prospects for reconciliation seem bleaker. In “When Honor Trumps Basic Needs: The Role of Honor in Deadly Disputes within Israel's Arab Community,” he reports on “honor killings” and “blood feuds” among Israel's rural Arab clans, describing cases in which antagonists get caught up in escalating cycles of retribution even knowing that the costs to themselves, their families, and their communities will be huge and ongoing.

On a more cheerful note, Mark Young and Erik Schlie urge us to consider dance as a metaphor for negotiation in their article, “The Rhythm of the Deal: Negotiation as a Dance.” As they observe, much of our language about negotiation has belligerent associations. Think, for example, about how words like “strategy” and “tactics” come from military theory. Dance is more expansive, as it can be creative, collaborative, and, yes, competitive as well.

Fredrik Stanton's Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World, ably reviewed here by James K. Sebenius, offers vivid portraits of historical figures who were engaged in the kind of negotiations that Winston Churchill once described as “conversations of silk and steel.” Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Mikhail Gorbachev are a few of the negotiators in Stanton's pantheon. Along with the others, they might variously be seen as warrior dancers: charming waltzers who could also throw a left hook or nimble boxers who were light on their feet.

Jim knows much about great negotiators himself: over the past decade he has also led the Program on Negotiation's (PON) Great Negotiator award program, in which a distinguished group of men and women from around the world have been honored for their work in diplomacy, business, and the arts.

Thanks to his efforts, PON — and the broader negotiation community — now have access to a trove of materials, both text and video, to enrich the knowledge of researchers, teachers, and their students. Sadly, the importance of documenting the experience, wisdom, and values of our honorees was brought home recently by the death of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. He was honored in 2004, having earlier negotiated the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. More recently he was working to bring peace and security to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His death followed that of two other honorees, the artist Jean‐Claude, who shared the award with her husband, Christo, in 2008, and financial leader Bruce Wasserstein, who was the recipient in 2007. Those of us who had the privilege of learning from these rare and generous people feel a personal loss. We extend our sympathy and gratitude to their respective families, friends, and colleagues.

The familiar phrase ars longa, vita brevis was a Roman appropriation of an aphorism by Hippocrates. Ars (and its Greek equivalent) encompassed not just the aesthetic arts, but medicine and technology. In Latin, the full text is:

In English this is commonly rendered as:

The ancient sentiment fits well the lives, work, and legacies of all of our Great Negotiators, those who are still with us and those others who died much too soon.