We always imagine Berber pirates as teachers of pillage, but their greatest art was another: negotiation

Centuries ago Berber pirates They supposed a true headache for Spanish sailors, a threat to stalking from the coast of Tunisia, Tripoli or Algiers that could make an expedition end up the worst of the ways: with the prey crew, turned into captives of The privateers Or, worse, in slaves who sold to the highest bidder if no one paid their rescue. Today those pirates from North Africa and the Spanish negotiators who were dealing with them suppose something different For economists: a unique opportunity to study negotiation techniques.

And they have already left us a few lessons.

Learning thanks to pirates. It sounds strange, but that is what a group of economists from the universities of Duke, Harvard and Vienna was proposed for a while: learn from the negotiations between the Pirates of the Mediterranean and the emissaries in charge of paying for hostage rescues. For this they included data from thousands of captives arrested by the Berber more than three centuries, between 1575 and 1692. The result published it A few years ago in An article Signed by Attila Ambrus, Eric J. Chaney and Igor Salitskiy.

But … why? For several reasons. The main one, because the researchers detected in those ‘strip and loosen with pirates an interesting example of negotiations with “Asymmetric information”that is, those in which one of the parts that seeks a deal manages more data than the other. After all, when the pirates arrested the passenger of a ship, they could not be certain of what their social status was, if it came from a family with more or less money or if there were people willing to pay a good sum in exchange for their freedom.

“There was an asymmetry of substantial information between the Spaniards and the pirates,” The authors explain in his Paperin which they add that, among other issues, the privateers could not know if the delay of a rescue was due to the lack of interest in the hostage, a strategy to lower the price or simply the difficulties to move in pre -industrial Spain, in which the news could take days to arrive from Africa to the center of the peninsula.

Uncertainty, the key. “Although the Algiers knew that the Spaniards preferred to rescue certain types of captives Aya could often identify the individuals of greater rank, there is evidence that they faced the uncertainty about what prisoners they wanted to rescue the Spaniards and how much they were willing to pay,” The researchers point out. In fact, they cite instructions from the time that they advised rescue teams to pretend disinterest in the hostages they wanted. To avoid this, the privateers encouraged captivity to identify each other.

A not -so -old problem. The second reason why the analysis is interesting is because the problem of piracy and bailouts is not really so old. In Your article The researchers remember that between 1530 and 1780 the pirates captured and enslaved thousands of people and claim to have used records of 4,680 hostages rescued in 22 expeditions, but the reality is that The kidnappings And rescue follow the agenda in the 21st century, a reality that the authors also point out.

Ambrus, Chaney E Salitskiy, for example, remember that the payment of bailouts has been an important source of income for terrorist groups such as ISIS or al Qaeda or that Somali pirates managed A political dilemma and Reason for controversy over the last years, with cases particularly sounded.

And what have they discovered? After analyzing negotiations with Mediterranean pirates, experts reached an interesting conclusion: the rush is not good companions for those who want to pay bailouts … or directly those who pursue a most favorable possible agreement in a “asymmetric information” scenario. The reason? After analyzing data that include thousands of captives rescued from the claws of the Berber pirates between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the economists concluded that the delays in the negotiations cheated the payments.

“We documented a solid negative relationship between delays in negotiation (measured by captivity time) and the prices of rescue,” They conclude The researchers add: “It should be noted that the results are probably more relevant to current rescue and negotiation situations, which are characterized by unilateral private information.” In fact they consider that the way of acting with the Berber privateers “can contribute ideas” to deal with modern Somali pirates.

A percentage: 8%. The researchers even went further and concluded that a year increase in the captivity of the host about 8%. It is an even greater reduction than that can be associated with the prisoner’s own aging, which also influenced the bailouts. “Since the sources suggest that the pirates were concerned with preserving the value of the captives they expected to rescue, this suggests that most of the decrease in the price over time was due to the value of the delay.”

Common sense … and something else. That most time relationship, less cost ‘may seem simple (even intuitive), but it is not so easy to establish it. The reason is that more factors come in play. For example, pirates could identify the captives of greater “value”, in exchange for those who requested higher amounts and those who were willing to embark on longer negotiations. In the case of prisoners with a lower “valuation”, with low rescue prices, the process would be faster.

Another factor to keep in mind is that in preindustrial Spain, not all negotiations were extended for a strategic issue. Sometimes they did it simply because the news about the captivity took days or weeks to arrive from Algiers to the ports of Alicante, Cartagena or Valencia and from there to the peoples where the families of the hostages lived. That without the time had to raise the funds and move them, something that religious orders used to take care of.

The importance of strategy. All these factors are relevant because they influence, among other issues, in the imbalance of information that captors and rescuers had, but The investigation From Ambrus, Chaney and Salitskiy points out that these “exogenous” conditioners influence the price of rescues. A key piece is what they call “strategic delay”, which directly sought that the pirates improved their offers.

“These instructions seem to have followed in practice, since they have preserved evidence that they left the prisoners in captivity for longer to obtain lower prices,” the authors slide. “For example, in the registration of a rescue mission at the end of the XVI, the writing points out that some hostages were not rescued on that trip because their prices were ‘too high'”.

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