Pick an item to buy, choose the seller you're dealing with, set your walkaway price (the most you'll honestly pay), then make your opening offer. The Doctor scores every move as you go.
1 · What are you buying?
2 · Who's selling?
3 · Your walkaway price
— negotiating with
🧔
Mood: neutral
frustratedhappy
Current price
$0
Tip: type any message, or attach an offer. Quick phrases trigger specific tactics — the Doctor watches every one.
🩺 Deal Doctor
Why this project?
Negotiation is a skill most people never practice — we haggle for cars, salaries, and leases on instinct, then wonder why the price barely moved. Existing "negotiation simulators" all rely on an LLM chatbot as the opponent, which means they need API keys, produce different opponents every run, and can't actually score your technique. Deal Doctor's premise: make the AI opponent a transparent, deterministic rule engine — and turn the real star feature into a Doctor's Panel that grades your tactics line-by-line, the way a sports analyst grades a replay.
What is it?
A turn-based haggling simulator. You pick an item, pick a seller with a distinct personality (the Aggressive Haggler, the Patient Grandfather, the Corporate Buyer, the Desperate Seller), set a walkaway price, and negotiate. The seller has a hidden floor price and reacts to your specific moves — offers, lowballs, flattery, threats to walk, claims of scarcity — with its own patience and mood model. When the deal ends, you get a final grade (A+ to F), a breakdown of where points were won and lost, and a full transcript.
How does it work?
Seller engine: each seller has a hidden floor (55–85% of asking depending on personality), a patience budget, and a mood value. Your offers move the current price via concession curves: the seller concedes a shrinking fraction of the remaining gap each turn, and mood modifiers speed up or stall concessions.
Tactic detection: every one of your messages is matched against tactic patterns (anchoring, lowball, anchoring-to-research, flattery, walkaway threat, scarcity, social proof, patience, concession pacing). Each detection nudges the seller's mood/patience and updates the Doctor's running score.
Doctor's scoring: seven independent rubrics — Opening Anchor, Concession Discipline, Walkaway Leverage, Patience, Information Play, Flattery & Rapport, and Exit — each 0–100, weighted into a letter grade. The weights reflect what negotiation research (anchoring effects, BATNA/walkaway discipline) says actually moves outcomes.
How to use it
Set up: pick an item and a seller, set your walkaway price (be honest — the Doctor grades against it), and hit Begin.
Open low, with justification: type an offer and a reason ("research says it's worth $X"). A well-justified low anchor scores highest.
Concede in halves: never jump a huge gap in one move. Small, shrinking concessions score best.
Use the quick phrases to trigger specific tactics — but the Doctor dings you for repeated or mistimed ones.
End the deal by accepting the seller's price (offer ≥ current price) or by walking away. Walk away before you exceed your walkaway price to keep points.