Tommy Koh and the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement: A Multi-Front 'Negotiation Campaign'

20 Pages Posted: 19 Dec 2014

See all articles by Laurence Green

Laurence Green

Harvard Business School

James K. Sebenius

HBS Negotiations, Organizations and Markets Unit

Date Written: December 16, 2014

Abstract

Complex, multiparty negotiations are often analyzed as principals negotiating through agents, as two-level games (Putnam 1988), or in coalitional terms. The relatively new concept of a "multi-front negotiation campaign" (Sebenius 2010, Lax and Sebenius, 2012) offers an analytic approach that may enjoy descriptive and prescriptive advantages over more traditional approaches that focus on a specific negotiation as the unit of analysis. The efforts of Singapore Ambassador-At-Large Tommy Koh to negotiate the United States-Singapore Free Trade agreement serve as an extended case study of a complex, multiparty negotiation that illustrates and further elaborates the concept of a negotiation campaign.

Keywords: Tommy Koh, negotiation campaign, fronts, negotiation, diplomacy, multiparty negotiations, free trade, Singapore, international relations, United States, Special Trade Representative

Suggested Citation

Green, Laurence and Sebenius, James K., Tommy Koh and the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement: A Multi-Front 'Negotiation Campaign' (December 16, 2014). Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 15-053, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2539774 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2539774

Laurence Green

Harvard Business School ( email )

Soldiers Field Road
Morgan 270C
Boston, MA 02163
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James K. Sebenius (Contact Author)

HBS Negotiations, Organizations and Markets Unit ( email )

Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
United States
617-495-9334 (Phone)
617-496-7379 (Fax)

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