Peggy Downing, an assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto, has won the Judith King Memorial Prize for Negotiation in the book “Emotion and the Interests of Business.” She is the first woman to win the award since it was established in 1998.
The prize was announced Monday by the King Foundation, a fund named for its namesake, a former legal writer and editor who was dean of the law school at the University of Minnesota for two decades and retired in 2009.
The award focuses on policy books by academics in the field of negotiation, which Downing writes about. Judges say it is “an unusually important prize in how research into negotiation is used in practice.”
“The book begins with a discussion of unilateral elimination and goes on to identify the most successful types of negotiations in business and government,” the judges said. “The book’s authors also conduct a number of interviews with real-life negotiators and graduate student interns.”
The judges commended Downing’s approach and its depth. “She developed an important method for collecting and understanding interpersonal information that makes it easier to analyze persuasive oral and written arguments,” they said. “She then synthesized the information to explain the impact of the negotiation-relevant information on the strength and effectiveness of the argument.”