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Summer School

Culture and Negotiation in Management
Experimental Methods in Intercultural Relationships

Organized by:
BonnEconLab, Laboratorium für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung, University of Bonn

College of Mathematical Sciences
Sichuan University

Funded by:
Sino-German Center for Research Promotion, Beijing, PR China
(German Research Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China)

Yin He Dynasty Hotel, Sichuan University, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, PR China
October 13-22, 2006

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Objectives

Bargaining belongs to the most frequent phenomena in social interactions being the essential activity in management, international trade, national and international politics. Understanding the behavior of bargaining partners, their goals and motivations is a prerequisite for reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement. This is even more important if the cultural background of the parties is different like with Western and Asian partners. Successful business relations can only be created and sustained if uncertainties due to misunderstanding are removed. Because of disparities in Chinese and Western value systems, negotiations and joint business projects might become extremely difficult if partners are not aware of these cultural differences. One of the main topics of the summer school, therefore, is to have participants experience intracultural and intercultural negotiation situations. The negotiation setup is applied to the methodological framework of experimental economics, in particular laboratory experiments.

The goal of experimental economics is to study human judgment and decision-making. To this end, empirical data are collected in controlled experiments in which subjects are supplied with monetary incentives and make real decisions in economically relevant decision situations.

The Sino-German Summer School on “Culture and Negotiation in Management – Experimental Methods in Intercultural Relationships” serves two main goals. The first goal is to enable participants to integrate methods of experimental economics into their research. The second goal is to initiate and promote intercultural communication and exchange between German and Chinese researchers.

As to the first goal, participants will be made familiar with the concept and background of experimental economics and will learn its essential features. They will be trained in different experimental methods (paper and pencil, computer, video). They will gain knowledge of how to conduct experiments starting with a research question, formulating hypotheses, designing an adequate experiment, preparing the experiment as to instructions, the computer program and procedural details, running the experiment, analyzing the data and finally writing the paper and presenting the results.

Participants will be familiarized with different simple experiments allowing to study basic behavioral characteristics usually at odds with standard game theoretic predictions. The teaching principle will be “learning by doing” in that students actively participate in these experiments and thus experience the experimental situation themselves facing the possible impact on behavior. After each experiment, subjects will have the opportunity to discuss their impressions and motivations, give comments and suggestions. Finally, one of the experts will give a lecture concerned with the experiment and putting it into a broader research context.

As to the second goal, we will make use of the unique intercultural environment of the summer school and apply the experimental methods in an intercultural context. Participants will experience intra- and inter-culturally composed interactions. In addition, they will analyze the experimental data with regard to behavioral differences and similarities in mixed-cultural teams. Finally, they will present their results at the end of the summer school.

Lecturers

Simon Gaechter
School of Economics, University of Nottingham, U.K.

Heike Hennig-Schmidt
BonnEconLab, Laboratorium für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung, University of Bonn, Germany

Zhu-Yu Li
Department of Economical and Financial Mathematics, College of Mathematical Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, PR China

Xiangdong Qin
Department of Economics, Antai School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, PR China

Reinhard Selten
BonnEconLab, Laboratorium für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung, University of Bonn, Germany

Application

Who can apply

Participants of the Summer School should be talented doctoral students in management science at the beginning of their Ph.D. interested in experimental economics and intercultural studies. We can only accept students from mainland China and Germany, up to 15 for each country. Participant should have no experimental background. Participant should have very good knowledge in English because English is the official language of the summer school. Video experiments are a vital part of the summer school. Therefore, we will only accept Ph.D. students willing to participate in video experiments and prepared to be video taped.

How to apply

Please send all application material by e-mail: summerschool2006(at)uni-bonn.de

Deadline for applications

• from Germany: August 3, 2006

• from China: August 25, 2006

Official web site

To learn further details on the summer school please check the official web site at Bonn EconLab.

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