Department of Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University.
Psychol Sci. 2020 Jun;31(6):644-653. doi: 10.1177/0956797620916705. Epub 2020 May 11.
Negotiation scholarship espouses the importance of opening a bargaining situation with an aggressive offer, given the power of first offers to shape concessionary behavior and outcomes. In our research, we identified a surprising consequence to this common prescription. Through four studies in the field and laboratory (total = 3,742), we explored how first-offer values affect the recipient's perceptions of the offer-maker's trustworthiness and, subsequently, the recipient's behaviors. Specifically, we found that recipients of generous offers are more likely to make themselves economically vulnerable to their counterparts, exhibiting behaviors with potentially deleterious consequences, such as disclosing negative information. We observed this effect in an online marketplace (Study 1) and in an incentivized laboratory experiment (Study 3). We found that it is driven by the greater trust that generous first offers engender (Studies 2 and 3). These results persisted in the face of debiasing attempts and were surprising to lay negotiators (Studies 3 and 4).
谈判学术主张，鉴于首次报价在塑造让步行为和结果方面的强大影响力，应以激进的报价开启谈判局面。在我们的研究中，我们发现了这一常见做法的一个令人惊讶的后果。通过在现场和实验室进行的四项研究（总计 = 3742），我们探讨了首次报价的价值如何影响收件人对报价人的可信度的看法，以及随后收件人会采取何种行为。具体而言，我们发现慷慨的报价更有可能使收件人在经济上容易受到对方的影响，表现出可能产生有害后果的行为，例如披露负面信息。我们在一个在线市场（研究 1）和一个有激励的实验室实验（研究 3）中观察到了这一效应。我们发现，这是由慷慨的首次报价所产生的更大信任驱动的（研究 2 和 3）。这些结果在面对去偏努力时仍然存在，并且让谈判者感到惊讶（研究 3 和 4）。
