The Accuracy of Post-Negotiation Estimates of the Other Negotiator's Payoff

Jeryl L. Mumpower (), Jim Sheffield, Thomas A. Darling and Richard G. Milter
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Jeryl L. Mumpower: University at Albany, State University of New York, UAB 417
Jim Sheffield: University of Auckland
Thomas A. Darling: University of Baltimore
Richard G. Milter: Ohio University

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2004, vol. 13, issue 3, No 4, 259-290

Abstract: Abstract This paper describes two empirical studies of interpersonal understanding in negotiations. In the first study, the accuracy of post-negotiation estimates of the other negotiator's payoff was assessed after a role-playing simulation. Only a minority of participants exhibited evidence of the fixed pie bias, in which negotiators view all negotiations as distributive, fixed-sum situations. Participants' estimates of the other negotiator's payoff were generally better fit by the equal payoffs model, which presumes that participants believe the other negotiator's payoff is the same as one's own. This held true for both distributive task structures in which the fixed-pie view is descriptively appropriate and integrative negotiation task structures in which the fixed-pied view is inaccurate. The results did not support the hypothesis that superior understanding about the other negotiator's interests helps negotiators to achieve better outcomes for themselves; the correlation between predictive accuracy and the value of participants' own payoffs was generally low. A second study was conducted to test the hypothesis that negotiators typically see negotiations as fundamentally a distributive, fixed pie problem, but believe their own negotiated agreements yield roughly equal payoffs to both negotiators. The results supported this hypothesis. In this second study, participants estimated the other negotiator's payoffs over a sample of hypothetical contracts. The payoff schedule estimation procedure, which has been widely used in previous research, was not used in the present research because it was shown to have serious methodological, conceptual, and procedural problems in the context of the present study.

Keywords: fixed-pie bias; interpersonal understanding; negotiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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DOI: 10.1023/B:GRUP.0000031089.91654.26

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