Negotiations in Embedded Relationships: Toward an Integrative Framework

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, social network and negotiation scholars have been grappling with the same underlying question, What is the value of trading through embedded as opposed to arms-length market relationships? Despite this shared interest, negotiation and social network research has only recently started to intersect. This paper draws from negotiation and social network theory to move toward an integrative framework for understanding negotiations in embedded exchanges. Negotiation and social network theories are briefly reviewed and several unanswered questions are identified in each. Moving toward a more integrative theory, the paper decomposes exchanges into matching decisions and negotiations and proposes that different kinds of embeddedness (relational vs. structural) with different kinds of actors (buyers vs. sellers) will have different values in of these processes under different conditions (high vs. low risk).