during the interviews, it became evident that both parties were also performance judge based on their ability to negotiate price and as a consequence would go to great length to secure a good price for their respective companies. this also included turned to quite questionable practices in order to manipulate the suppliers. for instance, the development of market price for a standard commodity would often be heavily debated in the negotiation setting. here, buyer and suppliers would often be manipulate numbers and statistics by presenting them in excel spreadsheets that were at best confusing for the counterpart, only to be briefly represented as flatter or steeper depending on the point, buyer or supplier wanted to make.