Second, by focusing on price, the campaign workers limited their thinking about potential deals to a simple Battle Line over the price to be paid. Reflex- ively, they saw their best no-deal option as awful: risking Roosevelt’s presi- dential election prospects, and/or incurring a huge financial liability. They implicitly judged Moffett’s best no-deal option to be robust: a credible lawsuit threat on very strong legal grounds. As such, the campaign workers readily assumed that the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) in this case—the deals between each side’s best no-deal options—ran from the campaign paying nothing all the way up to its paying $3 million, or at least its total resources.
That the ZOPA could also include Moffett’s paying something to the cam- paign—a logical possibility that in reality became the actual result—did not occur to them. (When we tell this story, it rarely occurs to our listeners either.) Yet there is absolutely nothing in the situation, save the limits of our own fre- quently unwarranted assumptions, that prevents the ZOPA from including a scenario in which Moffett pays an amount of money to the campaign. (And, by the way, had the campaign acted on the basis of such an incorrect assumption— for example, had the workers started the negotiation by offering to pay Moffett something—they could have created the very outcomes that they assumed to be inevitable. Bad assumptions can be self-fulfilling.)