A Cross-Disciplinary Area (CDA) at Columbia Business School

To a great extent, our lives are defined by the choices we make and the outcomes we negotiate. Every day brings an almost infinite number of forks in the road: an organizational leader somewhere decides which product to launch, a group of policymakers chooses how to curb environmentally-destructive behavior or an individual puzzles over how much to save or whether to trust a new acquaintance. Negotiations, too, pervade our lives. More than just formal haggling across a table, a negotiation unfolds each time parties come together to solve problems or allocate resources and responsibilities, from the delegation of tasks among members of a global work team to coalition formation among industry leaders or non-profit organizations in the face of a shared challenge.

Every day, each person — and each organization — faces choices and negotiations that will determine success, happiness, wealth, health, and security. With globalization and global challenges, the stakes for our choices and bargaining have never been higher than they are now. And with accumulating knowledge, the potential for social science to inform good practices for decision making and negotiations has never been greater. Columbia Business School takes this potential seriously.

The Decision Making and Negotiations area described here is at the
heart of how Columbia is fostering these connections. This website
describes both who we are and what we do.