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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Statistical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association.This article presents the results of a Monte Carlo study of the robustness of scale estimates in the presence of long-tailed, symmetric distributions. The article examines the performance of several families of estimates in samples of size 20 from several distributions. The family of A-estimators, finite sample approximations to the asymptotic variance of M-estimators of location, appears to be more robust than the sample standard deviation, the median absolute deviation from the median (MAD), trimmed standard deviations, and M-estimators of scale. The most successful A estimator uses the biweight weighting function, which is also the basis for high-performance robust location estimates.

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Much of our understanding of negotiation focuses on the process at the table involving a complicated set of interpersonal dynamics and strategies, or a “one‐dimensional” approach to the subject. Conceptually independent of one‐dimensional process factors is a second dimension of negotiation, “dealcrafting,” which focuses on substance in the effort to create joint value. A third dimension of negotiation, involving entrepreneurial moves “away from the table,” includes the first two dimensions but offers ways in which negotiators can change the game advantageously. Within this overall 3‐D perspective, the second dimension (dealcrafting) calls for a relentless focus on creating maximum value and an equally relentless focus on differences as means to create joint gains. Following their description of the overall 3‐D approach, the authors use numerous case examples to illustrate how principles of dealcrafting work in practice.

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Agents often bargain on behalf of their principals. In many common negotiating situations, especially where ex post ratification of the agent's agreement is required (e.g., union contracts, treaties), an agent faces inherent uncertainty about the terms that are minimally acceptable to the principal (the principal's “reservation price”). In fact, the agent's entire payoff function may be uncertain. We study bargaining behavior in these circumstances and show that the agent's minimum demands unambiguously increase with increases in uncertainty about the principal's reservation price, with increases in uncertainty about the payoff function, and with increases in the agent's degree of risk aversion. We then fashion these results about an individual agent's behavior into conclusions about the difficulty of reaching agreement in the overall negotiations. Using Axelrod's measure of the “conflict of interest” in a game, optimal insistence prices in a one-shot bargaining situation, and two equilibrium concepts in a common commitment game, we show that the inherent uncertainty of agency bargaining can frequently make disagreement more likely.