BATNA: The Harvard Term That Decides Who Holds the Power in a Negotiation

Roger Fisher, a law professor at Harvard, didn’t give his students a formula for negotiating better. He gave them a single question that changes the outcome of almost any negotiation before it even begins: what would you do if this deal doesn’t close?

The answer to that question has a name. Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project called it BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) in Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, one of the most influential negotiation books since its publication in 1981. Bruce Patton joined as co-author for the second edition, in 1991.

Power doesn’t come from resources, it comes from the alternative

The central idea is counterintuitive the first time you hear it: power in a negotiation doesn’t depend on how many resources you have, but on how well off each party would be if this particular negotiation failed. Fisher and Ury frame it this way: the better your alternative, the less you depend on reaching an agreement and the more room you have to negotiate.

A party with few resources but a solid alternative can negotiate from a stronger position than one with far more money but no viable plan B.

The book turns preparing a BATNA into a three-step procedure:

1. Draw up a list of what you could do if no deal is reached.
2. Develop the most promising ideas until they become real alternatives, not hypothetical ones.
3. Choose the best of them as your benchmark.

That alternative, and not your opening position or your ideal number, is what actually protects you from accepting a deal worse than doing nothing.

From BATNA to reservation price and the zone of agreement

BATNA has two sibling concepts widely used in negotiation research, especially since The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982) by Howard Raiffa, also a Harvard professor:

• The reservation price is the point beyond which a party would rather not close the deal. It follows from the BATNA: if there’s an alternative outside the table worth X, any deal worse than X isn’t worth it.
• The zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) is the range between the two parties’ reservation prices. If it exists, there are deals that leave both better off; if it doesn’t, the rational move is not to close.

An example: a job offer

Someone receives an offer of $38,000. They already have another firm offer of $40,000 from a company they like somewhat less: at equal pay they’d prefer the first, and they figure that preference is worth about $1,500. Their BATNA is the second offer, and their reservation price for the first is $38,500. Below that figure, the alternative is the better choice.

If the company is willing to pay up to $42,000, the ZOPA runs from $38,500 to $42,000. Knowing their BATNA doesn’t tell them where the deal will land within that range, but it does keep them from accepting the initial $38,000 out of fear of ending up with nothing. How the zone gets split depends on another factor, the first figure put on the table, which we cover in the article on how to negotiate your salary.

What experimental research says

BATNA isn’t just a textbook intuition. In simulated lab negotiations, people who had an alternative obtained better individual outcomes and a larger share of the total value than those who didn’t (Brett, Pinkley, and Jackofsky, 1996).

The same study leaves a useful nuance: when the alternative was combined with a specific goal or with high confidence in one’s own ability, the impasse rate also went up, meaning more negotiations ended without a deal. A good alternative gives you strength, but it also makes it easier to walk away in cases where a deal was possible.

Why setting a “bottom line” isn’t the answer

A common temptation is to protect yourself by fixing, in advance, a limit below which you won’t budge under any circumstances. Fisher and Ury warn of its hidden cost: a rigid bottom line does prevent you from accepting bad offers, but it also stifles imagination, because it keeps you from making use of new information that surfaces during the conversation or from inventing options you hadn’t considered at the outset.

A good BATNA protects you without that side effect, because it isn’t an arbitrary limit but a real benchmark, and one you can keep improving while you negotiate.

The method’s four principles, and BATNA as a safety net

BATNA isn’t one of the four principles of the Harvard method, which are the most often cited:

• separate the people from the problem,
• focus on interests, not positions,
• invent options for mutual gain before deciding,
• and insist on objective criteria.

It’s their complement: what protects someone applying those principles when the other side doesn’t follow them or has much more power. Among the sources of power the book describes there’s also a less well-known one, the power of a well-crafted commitment: a concrete offer reduces the other side’s uncertainty and, for that reason, can be more persuasive than a vague offer, even a generous one.

The catalogue of dirty tricks, named one by one

What sets this method apart from common-sense advice is that it also catalogues, by name, the tactics one side uses to take advantage of the other:

• ambiguous authority: negotiating with someone who later says they don’t have real authority to close the deal;
• psychological warfare: deliberately stressful situations, personal attacks, the good-cop-bad-cop routine;
• escalating demands: asking for more every time the other side concedes, so they’ll want to close as soon as possible;
• and the classic “take it or leave it."

"Negotiation jujitsu”

Against these attacks, the method proposes not pushing back or clinging to your own position, but deflecting the force of the attack toward the problem. In practice, that means treating a hard stance as one more option, asking what interest lies behind it, and taking a personal criticism as a criticism of the problem.

The one-text procedure

If that isn’t enough, the book describes the one-text procedure, the one used by the American mediators at Camp David in 1978. A third party listens to both sides, drafts a proposed agreement, and keeps revising it with each side’s criticisms, round after round, without asking anyone to give up their position until the end. That separates the people from the problem and narrows the disagreement until the interests really at stake come into view.

When the other side is much stronger

The method doesn’t promise that anyone can win any negotiation. When the other side holds much more power, no technique guarantees an outcome: the most a good BATNA can do is keep you from accepting a deal you should reject and help you make the best of a weak position.

That distinction between negotiating better and always winning is what separates this approach from a book of tricks, and it’s why it remains the starting point of nearly every serious negotiation course.

If you want to identify what kind of negotiator you are before applying any of these ideas, our negotiation style quiz is a good place to start.

Sources

• Brett, J. F., Pinkley, R. L. and Jackofsky, E. F. (1996). Alternatives to having a BATNA in dyadic negotiation: The influence of goals, self-efficacy, and alternatives on negotiated outcomes. International Journal of Conflict Management, 7(2), 121-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb022778
• Fisher, R., Ury, W. and Patton, B. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1st ed., by Fisher and Ury, 1981; 2nd ed., with Patton, 1991). Houghton Mifflin.
• Raiffa, H. (1982). The Art and Science of Negotiation. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.