How Time is Used Strategically in Negotiation

Keywords: negotiation, time, strategy

Abstract: Time is a fundamental element of negotiation; it can affect many aspects including basic negotiation processes and outcomes, choice of tactics, and basic psychological processes of emotion, cognition and motivation. Often time is a condition or situation faced by the negotiator (e.g., “I am under time pressure – I must sell my car today because I am leaving town tonight!”). Time can be strategic, used by negotiators to achieve an objective, typically an effort to evoke compliance, e.g., the exploding offer (“The job offer is only good until tomorrow at noon”). Some strategies of negotiation only occur with time (e.g, the black-hat/white-hat sequence). Time can be used for building integrative agreements as well as for other forms of cooperation in negotiation. “Timing,” knowing when to do something for an effect, is an important skill in negotiation. There are many aspects of time in negotiation that are ripe for empirical investigation.