As a by-product of work on CPR’s Prevention Initiative, the members of CPR’s Prevention Exploratory Research Team identified many questions in the prevention field which deserve further research. The dispute resolution world and the Global Pound Conferences would benefit from further research into issues involving the prevention, control, de-escalation and “real time” resolution of disputes.
Among the questions that interested scholars are challenged to explore are the following Research Inquiries:
Research Inquiry: Why are business leaders so willing to fund dispute resolution efforts but reluctant to fund dispute prevention efforts? Is it because the process of resolving a live dispute is a tangible effort, a specific challenge that lawyers and dispute resolvers can attack and feel and touch while dispute prevention whose objective is to create “non-events, is intangible and less real? Could it be that it is easier to make money resolving disputes than to proactively make the effort to prevent disputes?
Research Inquiry: To what extent have there been empirical studies about the behavior of parties to a business relationship when they are confronted with an unexpected event emergency or problem which, if not addressed and solved, can escalate into a difference of opinion, a disagreement, a controversy, an argument, to an adversarial dispute?