Bargaining

Every day that I go into work, I participate as an agent in a triangle-like arrangement.  I work for the iHotel and Conference Center, and so a lot of our events are weddings and banquets and the like.  During the event, I must coordinate the guest's wants with our facilities capabilities.  Things can get really complicated on weekend nights, which is usually when we'll host weddings.  There is no fury like that wrought by the bride's mother.  So as you can imagine, it is very important in these situations to not only make sure that the bridal party is happy with the arrangements but it is also necessary to make sure that the wedding isn't interfering with any other events that may be ongoing.

For example, there was a wedding one time where the DJ brought in some of the biggest speakers that have ever been inside the Conference Center.  He said they were meant for outdoor concerts but they were all he had available that night.  When he turned them up and started playing music, every light in the building was rattling, the glass on the doors was shimmering from the vibrations, and every other event in the Conference Center at the time came to the front desk to ask what the hell all the noise was from.  In that case, we had to tell the DJ to keep it a little quieter until later in the night when the other events were done.  For the most part though, I, acting as the agent, will usually satisfy the bridal party over the concerns of our other events because it is such a 'special' day for them.

However, things get really interesting when we have two weddings go on at the same time.  Now, I have no options where I don't impinge on someone's special day.  This is a worst case scenario because after I have gotten done arbitrating the two parties, neither one feels satisfied and both feel that I am to blame.  This leads to me altering my behavior so that I can prevent bad things from happening before they happen, even if that prevention looks intrusive to someone that isn't aware of the future possibilities.  For example, if one wedding has an open bar and one wedding has a cash bar, then there have been times where people will crash the other wedding, get free drinks, and then bring them back to the original wedding.  In order to prevent this, I can stand in the hallway between the two weddings and not allow people to go on the other side.  This can seem intrusive and arbitrary to those who I turn away, but it is necessary because I am prevents a much larger problem.

In this example, the way that people would choose the arbitrator would be to shop around at different conference centers or banquet halls, and the way that the arbitrator could choose their clients would be to accept or decline any events from those people.  I feel that this situation is rather common and can be applied in many places, such as the labor market, internal organizational policies, and governmental initiatives.