Negotiation and Gender: An Exploration in Virtual Reality

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Abstract: Prior research has documented males walk away with more value than females when parties are advocating for themselves in a fixed pie (distributive negotiation) context. Despite this fairly stable result, unanswered is how much of any gender difference is due to party’s own behavior (men and women making different opening offers, conceding at different rates) and how much is due to the other party’s reaction towards different genders (men and women making different opening offers and conceding at different rates depending of the gender of their counterpart). Using a virtual reality setting where negotiators meet as avatars allows us to design a 2 (true gender) X 2 (assigned gender) study whereby we can disentangle processes and outcomes related to “true” gender (supply side effects) from those related to “assigned” gender (demand side effects), and measure how much each might contribute to gender differences in negotiation processes and outcomes.