Definition
Plain language
The lowest price a seller will secretly say yes to.
As stated in the literature
The hidden reservation price held by each simulated counterparty; agents must locate it by probing with bids, and the oracle policy that reads it directly closes deals in ~1.0 offers versus a field median of ~30.
Also called: accept thresholds, acceptance boundary
Why it matters: It turns negotiation into a search problem, revealing whether an agent probes efficiently or wastes dozens of offers groping for a price it could have narrowed down in a few.
For example, a club will secretly settle for £8 million for a player, so a bid of £7.9 million gets rejected and a bid of £8.1 million is instantly accepted, but the buyer never sees the number.
Heard on the show
“It bids each seller's exact accept threshold and closes on the first offer.”Episode 245 — Fifteen Models Ran Football Clubs for Twenty Years, and Size Didn't Decide It