Negotiating The Game Theory

Think Tank

At the students' village in Hyderabad's Indian School of Business (ISB), 37-year-old Madan M Pillutla can easily pass off as a student himself.

For this B-school teacher, an associate professor from London Business School (before that, he was assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and visiting faculty member at ISB, mingling with pupils after class is not to make them feel at home "" it's business as usual.

So the students at ISB haven't heard Pillutla hum Geeta Dutt numbers "" but they revel in his company nevertheless.

Pillutla teaches negotiation analysis and, according to his students, he presents a complex subject in a simple yet interesting way through case studies and techniques like the game theory.

Says an alumni from ISB, "The subject was difficult to execute, but he got in a lot of method into the madness."

Other students from the first batch at ISB say that the ever-approachable Pillutla would even take suggestions from students on providing India-specific cases.

Pillutla belongs to the competitive world of B-school teachers who are on the periphery of attaining stardom. Like most international B-school faculty members, Pillutla has a list of published works.

Some of the topics he has written about include Multi-Cultural Leadership Teams and Organisational Identification in International Joint Ventures, Unfairness, Anger and Spite: Emotional Rejections of Ultimatum Offers, and Being Fair or Appearing Fair: Strategic Behaviour in Ultimatum Bargaining.

In many of Pillutla's published works, one name finds prominence: J Keith Murnig-han, the Harold H Hines Jr distinguished professor of risk management, at the Kellogg Graduate school of management, whom Pillutla says he's closely worked with. Students say that Pillutla has referred to this association several times in class.

Among the three research projects that Pillutla is currently involved with, one investigates the effect of power on the negotiation process and its outcome.

"It looks at strategies or tactics that people who have low power use in negotiations and the consequences of these strategies," he explains.

Another project is on incentives in organisations. "There is some evidence that suggests that explicit and detailed measurement and reward of activities (individual, departmental or divisional) in organisations may have detrimental effects on social cohesion and spontaneous coordination" says Pillutla.

Simply put, detailed and specific contracts vitiate the cooperative atmosphere in organisations.

Pillutla, a mechanical engineer from BITS Pilani and a personnel management graduate from XLRI Jamshedpur, is also examining how decision-making strategies and tactics can differ in different contexts.

For example, do managers use a similar calculus when making people decisions as they do when making monetary decisions?

According to some of his students, the professor's early brush with negotiations was during his stint at ITC in the early-1990s.

Here, Pillutla "" who says "ITC was a great company and I thoroughly enjoyed working for it" "" had to negotiate with the unions who had declared a strike.

Pillutla brings rationality to the forefront in his negotiation analysis classes with an elaborate dose of humour. He makes the class a fun place to be in, and students say the take-away is amazing.

For example, students at ISB were asked to maintain diaries in which they had to enter whatever they learnt after every two or three classes.

This helped students introspect and analyse their behaviour at the negotiation table even better.

What are Pillutla's views on the game theory? "The theory asks you to see each situation clearly and tries to understand the payoffs and possible moves of the others. It is useful as a framework for understanding situations."

Pillutla remembers his visit to the Indian expatriate townships in Durban, South Africa, as an important moment in life: "I felt proud that I belonged to the same community as those people who managed to build a life when everything was taken away from them."

Perhaps it this urge to belong to people that helps Pillutla bond with his students.