Batna and eatna

BATNA is a term created by Roger Fisher and William Ury in their 1981 bestseller, ТGetting to Yes: Negotiating Without Giving InУ [10]. It stands for "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement." BATNAs are critical to negotiation because you cannot make a wise decision about whether to accept a negotiated agreement unless you know what your alternatives would be without such agreement. Having a BATNA, you protect yourself from accepting terms that are too unfavourable, and from rejecting terms it would be in your interest to accept. In other words, if the agreement that is being proposed is better than your BATNA, you should accept it. If the agreement is worse than your BATNA, you should re-open negotiations. And if the agreement cannot be improved, you should consider withdrawing from the negotiations and pursuing your alternative. Accepting an agreement that does not satisfy your interests might not only be counter-productive in the short run, but it might also set a precedent that other parties could use in future negotiations. If one gives way once, other parties might expect a similar deal in other rounds of negotiation.

Having an alternative (or a BATNA) is essential for maintaining oneХs negotiating power. ТThe more a party needs an agreement, the more it is willing to give in and the less influence it exhibits. At the end of the road, the ability to walk away from a deal is the ultimate source of bargaining power (Elsig 2006)У[11]. Good negotiators know when their opponents are desperate for an agreement. When that occurs, they will demand much more, knowing their opponents will have to give in. If the opponents apparently have many options outside of negotiation, they will have to make concessions, in an effort to keep them at the negotiating table. Thus, making your BATNA as strong as possible before negotiating, and then making that BATNA known to your opponents strengthens your negotiating position.

The BATNA is closely linked to the "power" held by the country. The range of alternatives available to a country depends closely on the size and strength of its economy. The more central is your position in the political and economic relations, the more alternatives to the disputed agreement you can develop. On the contrary, the political and economic dependence of small countries on only few alternatives place a constraint on their trade strategies and positions.

The perception of outside-the-negotiation options by others may not always be fully or only based on the reality of the alternatives available, and can therefore be influenced. Working to convince the other party that you could walk away from the negotiation can prove very rewarding in terms of negotiating gains. This is linked to what Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess have called EATNAs or "Estimated Alternatives To a Negotiated AgreementУ, an adaptation of the BATNA. Since perceptions are all that matters when it comes to deciding whether or not to accept an agreement, the objective of a country should ideally be to convince the others that it has an alternative, even if it is not the case. The more the adversary will believe you can walk out of the agreement, the more flexible he (or she) might become.

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