While visiting Washington, DC last week, we toured the current collections at the Katzen Arts Center at American University. Our timing coincided with a silent auction of art work leading up to a live auction event after we had left town. It happened that we very much liked one painting that, at the time, had no bids on it. After leaving town still thinking about the painting, we decided to join the silent auction through email and placed a bid. So far, so good. Unfortunately, at least two others developed an interest in the painting and we engaged in a series of asynchronous bids via email up until the closing of online bidding.
The bidding was still in a fairly reasonable zone – even considering the shipping costs we had to contemplate as part of any purchase price – but obviously we couldn’t be back in Washington for the live auction portion. And so we were assigned a “proxy bidder” that we didn’t know and couldn’t really communicate with during the event.
Storage Wars
As a negotiation trainer and mediator, I feel rather confident about my ability to measure people’s interests in live settings, even in events like auctions. No, I’m not about to start my own reality tv show like Canadian Pickers, Storage Wars, or Pawn Stars, but … There is a comfort in seeing or hearing the other person in any kind of negotiation. That comfort was stripped entirely by the proxy process: an email introduction to someone with absolutely no accompanying information on who he is, a request to simply send him a cap, and an assumption that all bidding done on our behalf would move by increments of $50.
Let me say here that we did not have the winning bid, and our proxy reported out that a woman at the event was bidding quickly in response to all of our bids and so he was sure she was committed enough to have continued even if we’d given a bit higher cap. He may well be correct, but I can’t help but be convinced that we could have sent much better messages about our own commitment levels had we not had to operate through a proxy with fixed increments. Of course anyone bidding against us would know that there was a cap from the way our bids were being presented, and we had no way to demonstrate significant interest through jumps in the bidding that might have deterred someone with the message that we intended to take it much further. Likewise, we couldn’t make a decision to increase our cap based on a read of the other bidder. All in all, wildly frustrating!
The experience reminded me more than anything of my frustration some years ago as a client in a legal negotiation for damages. When offers were getting relatively close together, my lawyer engaged in a direct negotiation with the other lawyer, and did not communicate with me between offers. As a result, my lawyer used my “bottom line” to negotiate a deal that was clearly less than I might have received had I been present because the two lawyers simply went back and forth without variation, splitting the difference over and over rather than identifying sticking points between the numbers. Of course that led to a predictable result: my lawyer went directly to the midway point between offer and demand, so the other lawyer was able to offer halfway between that and his last offer. And yes, the settlement was predictably in his client’s favour at 25% of the difference. Very frustrating! And entirely predictable.
So, my experience of negotiating by proxy in an auction has caused me to think yet again about the challenges of negotiation via counsel in the absence of clients. It is simply not true that proxy negotiators get better deals than the emotionally involved client does directly. Avoidance of difficult conversations may have a value in some cases, and be worth giving up control to a proxy, but apparently I am not well suited to the role of passive client! I am more annoyed about not being able to judge if backing off at our cap was a reasonable choice than I am at not getting the painting. So yes, this experience has strongly reinforced for me the learning of many procedural justice studies that some autonomy and client control is essential for a sense of procedural fairness. No more proxy bidding! At least, not unless I really do want to pay a price to stay away from the fray.
Fifty-Two Weeks 