I got an impression that any lawsuit goes like that everywhere. A claimant asks for outrageously high compensation and settles for much less.

> This applies from billion dollar lawsuits to buying a pack of cigarettes. Haggling is an art form there.

Some sellers in markets in the region will get offended if you don’t try and haggle, even it means they’ll make 10x the profit that they’d settle for.

It is not the about the money.

Traders would sometimes take a hit even for a good argument. There is no fun in making 10x money that way. They want to earn it.

You will find such traders in all over West Asia/arabic world like Egypt, Istanbul and as far off as delhi, not everyone is like that however, plenty will straight up cheat.

Do you have even anecdotal example of this behavior on industrial level, or just projecting your own touristic experience?

Yes - my business provided ecommerce infrastructure for a major Egyptian brand. The negotiations were... actually rather fun. It all started by phone and email, they tried to rip us off, we poked fun at their attempts, and returned in kind. Ultimately I flew out to Alexandria and after an afternoon of Very Serious Business we shook on it, and became best friends.

Elsewhere, there’s always a degree of horse trading, but the focus is on getting the deal done - here, the focus was very much on doing the deal. The negotiations over terms were far more of an assessment of us than the RFQ and the pitch were, whereas with western brands, the inverse is true.

It has nothing to do with cultural reasons. Every lawsuit in the U.S. and other places does the exact same thing, claim very high numbers, then perhaps settle for much less.