INFORMATION EXCHANGE, TOUGHNESS, AND INTEGRATIVE BARGAINING: THE ROLES OF EXPLICIT CUES AND PERSPECTIVE‐TAKING

Abstract

Information exchange is a significant factor in the achievement of integrative agreements in negotiation. However, it is not clear what factors govern information exchange. While tutoring negotiators in information exchange has clearly been shown to be effective, the experiment reported here was concerned with less directive interventions. Negotiators were either (a) alerted to the possibility that the other party's issue priorities were not the same as their own—and hence the problem not fixed pie in nature—(Priority condition); or (b) made aware of the need to look at problems from another's perspective (Perspective condition). Interest was in how these interventions would effect negotiators' spontaneous exchange of potential outcome information, their understanding of the integrative nature of the problem, and their joint outcome from their negotiated agreement, as compared with a control condition. In addition, the role of negotiator firmness in the achievement of integrative agreements was examined. It was found that Priority negotiators engaged in more information exchange, tended to be more accurate in their understanding of the nature of the bargaining problem, and achieved higher joint profits in their agreements than did control negotiators. Pairs whose summed perspective‐taking ability was higher made agreements with higher joint profits than those with lower perspective‐taking ability. Negotiator firmness was higher for the Priority condition than for the control condition. It was concluded that (a) spontaneous exchange of outcome information does occur when negotiators are cued to doubt the fixed pie hypothesis about possible outcomes of negotiation; (b) this exchange is associated with higher joint profits, i.e., with more integrative bargaining; but (c) firmness as well as information exchange appears to play an important role in integrative bargaining; in addition, (d) perspective‐taking does seem to encourage integrative bargaining, but it is difficult to induce, and how it operates is unclear.