{"id":219270,"date":"2010-01-19T12:40:24","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T17:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/?p=9539"},"modified":"2010-01-19T12:40:24","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T17:40:24","slug":"should-you-trust-your-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/219270","title":{"rendered":"Should you trust your agent?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Adapted from \u201cWhy You Should Question Your Agent\u2019s \u2018Objective\u2019 Advice,\u201d first published in the <\/em>Negotiation<em> newsletter.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You\u2019ve found a beautiful condo that you\u2019d like to call your own. You conduct a thorough assess\u00acment of its value and identify several other ap\u00acpealing properties in the same neighborhood and price range. Believing you\u2019ve found the magic bid, you phone your real-estate agent.<br \/>\n\u201cHmm&#8230;,\u201d he says. \u201cSounds low. I\u2019d bump it up by $10,000, just to be safe.\u201d<br \/>\nThis sounds high to you, but he\u2019s the expert. Should you follow his advice?<br \/>\nPerhaps not. Whenever you negotiate through an agent, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/deepak-malhotra\/\">Deepak Malhotra<\/a> and Max H. Bazerman note in their book, Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond (Bantam, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/2007\/\">2007<\/a>), the possibility of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/conflict\/\">conflict<\/a> of interest\u2014a clash between what\u2019s best for you and what\u2019s best for your representative\u2014emerges.<br \/>\nIt\u2019s not that most agents are intentionally corrupt. Your realtor may truly believe that your happiness is his No. 1 priority. But if he will gain the most financially from a quick deal at a high price (and he probably will), he may find himself thinking of times when clients missed out on their dream homes by bidding too low\u2014never mind that you have a few other dream condos in mind.<br \/>\nFederal and state <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/government\/\">government<\/a>s typically try to minimize such problems by requiring full disclosure of conflicts of in\u00acterest, write Malhotra and Bazerman. Yet a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/2005\/\">2005<\/a> laboratory study by researchers Daylian Cain, George Loewenstein, and Don Moore suggests that disclosure statements not only fail to reduce conflicts of interest but may actually exacerbate them. As it turns out, disclosure doesn\u2019t ap\u00acpear to motivate us to examine our agents\u2019 advice more carefully. Furthermore, disclosure gives advisers \u201cstrategic reason and moral license\u201d to exaggerate their advice fur\u00acther, according to Cain and his colleagues.<br \/>\nHow can you prevent conflicts of interest from tainting your outcomes? Press your agent to back up advice with objective criteria\u2014and check her advice against feedback from experts who don\u2019t have a stake in your outcome. Finally, if your agent seems to be claiming more value than she creates, consider whether you can get a better deal on your own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adapted from \u201cWhy You Should Question Your Agent\u2019s \u2018Objective\u2019 Advice,\u201d first published in the Negotiation newsletter. You\u2019ve found a beautiful condo that you\u2019d like to call your own. You conduct a thorough assess\u00acment of its value and identify several other ap\u00acpealing properties in the same neighborhood and price range. Believing you\u2019ve found the magic bid, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4300,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4300"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}