The Hearts Negotiations Game

Hearts is an engaging simulation that involves students in a high-stakes art sale

This two-party, distributive exercise focuses on how the exchange of information and the exchange of prices influence outcomes. The web interface pairs students, and on their own devices (laptops/tablets/phones) students read private background information, answer short survey questions, and negotiate. In the negotiation, participants exchange messages and offers via a chat interface.

The exercise introduces foundational concepts in negotiation, such as a bargaining zone, the importance of initial offers, and characteristics of the negotiation dance. The exercise also highlights the importance of seeking information, perspective taking, and the unstable nature of negotiator satisfaction.

The facilitator interface creates real-time graphs to support the immediate debrief of the exercise. These graphs include a histogram of final prices, negotiation dances for each dyad, graphs linking initial offers to final offers, and graphs of satisfaction. Hearts is easy to set up and play in any classroom or distributed learning setting. It easily scales from a small class to hundreds of students.

Hearts works well as an introductory exercise and is rich enough to use as a stand-alone exercise. The learning objectives can vary depending upon your goals as the instructor and the nature of the class.

This is a hugely popular and memorable game that students really enjoy.